Caught Out in Cornwall is the last of the Cornish series of mystery novels by Janie Bolitho, who unfortunately died in 2002, the year before this book was published. In it, artist Rose Trevelyan once again finds herself caught up in a crime, when she sees a young girl being picked up and taken from a beach by a man with whom the child seems familiar; moments later, a distraught young mother starts calling for her missing child. The mother is certain that her daughter has been taken by a stranger, and Detective Inspector Jack Pearce, Rose's sometime boyfriend, is soon on the case, organizing search parties and feretting out information from the family, with the hope of finding the child quickly. But the more time passes, the less likely it is that little Beth will be found alive, and Rose feels a responsibility toward the frantic family; after all, if she'd recognized that there was something wrong in what she saw, the little girl might never have gone missing at all.... I've enjoyed this 3-book series, set in beautiful Cornwall, UK (where I lived as a child), and it's a shame that there are no more. Unfortunately, while the story is good and the characters well-drawn, there are a lot of little mistakes in this book that the publisher should have caught, but didn't. A lot of idiosyncratic punctuation that can be confusing, but also bits of uncorrected text here and there such as referring to a character by the wrong name, or one instance where Rose and Jack are dining out, food is brought to them but before they start to eat they finish a plot-point conversation, then the food is brought to them as for the first time. Such sloppy editing mars the novel, but overall this was a good, solid series, and the author will be missed.
