The Nature of Things

  This is one of those rare books that grabbed me from the first page and didn't let go until the last sentence.  The story begins outside Oxford in 1999. Three teenage siblings, two brothers and a sister, had expected their dad to pick them up from school that day, but he didn't come and so they started walking home along a country road. Along the way in a hayfield beside the road, the sister, Zoe, noticed something that looked out of place among the bales of hay, and she went to investigate. She found a boy, a young man really, who looked a bit older than the siblings. Someone had obviously left his body in the field. He was alive but seriously injured and unconscious. It appeared he had been stabbed. While Zoe and Matthew the older brother stayed with the boy, Zoe talking to him and trying to comfort him even though she wasn't sure he could hear her, the younger brother, Duncan, went back to the road to try to flag someone down to get help. (These, of course, were the da...