Susie Steiner, who has died aged 51, three years after being diagnosed with incurable brain cancer, was once asked how similar she was to Detective Sergeant Manon Bradshaw, the member of the Cambridgeshire Major Incident Team first encountered by readers in her 2016 novel Missing, Presumed. “Manon is only 98.34% me – the rest is pure invention,” she responded.
Although she was evidently joking – she had never been a police officer, and nor was she unhappily embroiled in the world of internet dating, as Manon is at the beginning of her fictional life – her answer had a core of truth. It was Steiner’s interest and intuitive understanding of the dynamics between people, her ability to be alive to the complexities of their desires and their frailties, and her commitment to exploring questions of justice and equality, that animated her protagonist and made her so memorable.
