They are some of Ireland's most famous names, for all the wrong reasons. They are Ireland's missing women, many of them murdered and their bodies hidden by evil killers who remain at large. They include Annie McCarrick, who was murdered in the Dublin-Wicklow mountains; Jo Jo Dullard, who was abducted and murdered while hitching a lift in Co. Kildare; and Fiona Pender, who was seven months pregnant when she was murdered and hidden at an unknown place in the midlands.

And then there are Ireland's missing children. What ever happened to little Mary Boyle, last seen walking near her grandparents' home in Co. Donegal? And where is Philip Cairns, who was abducted from a Co. Dublin roadside while walking to school?

Missing is a disturbing book, but it is also a tribute to the remarkable bravery of ordinary families who have lost a loved one in the most cruel and unexplained of circumstances.