“He’d just learnt to walk,” she said. “He was sitting playing on his blanket, then all of a sudden he was gone.”A 16-month-old boy is found drowned in a pond right by his home. Chief Inspector Sejer is called to the scene as there is something troubling about the mother’s story. As even her own family turns against her, Sejer is determined to get to the truth.

Through a particularly ill-fated series of events, couch potato Maeve Kelly, an elementary school teacher, has been forced to sign up for the Other Half, Bath’s springtime half marathon. The training is brutal, but Maeve must disprove her mother, who insists that exercise is a waste of her time, and collect pledges for her aunt’s beloved charity. What she doesn’t know is just how vicious some of the other runners are.

Meanwhile, Detective Peter Diamond is tasked with crowd control on the raucous day of the race — and catches sight of a violent criminal he put away a decade ago, who very much seems to be back to his old ways now that he is paroled. Diamond’s hackles are already up when he learns that one of the runners never crossed the finish line and disappeared without a trace. Was Diamond a spectator to murder?

Set in Boston at the end of the First World War, bestselling author Dennis Lehane's extraordinary eighth novel unflinchingly captures the political and social unrest of a nation caught at the crossroads where past meets future. Filled with a cast of richly drawn, unforgettable characters, The Given Day tells the story of two families — one black, one white — swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power. Coursing through the pivotal events of a turbulent epoch, it explores the crippling violence and irrepressible exuberance of a country at war with, and in the thrall of, itself.