Madeleine: Our daughter's disappearance and the continuing search for her

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Kate McCann's very personal account of those torturous years. A testament to the human spirit in the face of unbelievable adversity. I spotted Maddie in Morocco on 9 May 2007 - 10 years later the sighting still haunts me" - Daily Star, 19 Apr 2017

Losing a child must be the most painful thing a parent can go through, but having one disappear whilst in a foreign country and then having pretty much the whole of the UK, if not the world turn on you and suspect you are guilty of your child's disappearance must be heartbreaking every single day. Yet, I personally believe the McCann's had something to do with Madeleine going missing. I'm not sure what I believe their involvement is, but I just don't see everything adding up. And this book doesn't help squash any of my beliefs (it helps it along in some places.) There really is no excuse. Can't believe the number of morons supporting these parents. They may not have sold their kid, or drugged her, or been directly responsible for her disappearance, but they left their toddlers alone; And just the response itself - they refused to cooperate, sued detectives who actually wanted to get to the bottom of this case (their ties to Clement Freud, for one, which have been swept under the rug by the MSM coverage of these cases), and seem like absolute narcissists, overall. The fact that they aren't being prosecuted just shows how privileged these people are, just by virtue of being doctors - if they had been normal, working or middle class people, they would have both been prosecuted and charged. Except that according to all her statements and now confirmed in the book Gerry did NOT make the visit he said he did. Otherwise it would be impossible for Kate to say that the door was open wider than "When WE had left it". On the night of the abduction, Kate admits they spent the evening not on the restaurant patio, but enjoying "liqueurs" inside the restaurant itself as it was too chilly outside. Unbelievable.No matter what you've read or heard about the case before, here you get the whole story, no private thing hidden, in great detail. And it will astonish you, make you angry, grieve you, and cause you to pray not only for Madeleine and her family, but for all stolen and missing children and their families. It will also make you hold your own children a little closer and think about how you can let them experience life while providing for their safety to the best of your ability.

I asked Gerry apprehensively if he'd had any really horrible thoughts or visions of Madeleine. He nodded. Haltingly, I told him about the awful pictures that scrolled through my head of her body, her perfect little genitals torn apart". While the subject matter is difficult, the story is important to read. For one thing, it accomplishes its objective, which is to keep Madeleine's name, face, and the event of her abduction, in the public memory, with the hope that someone, somewhere, sometime, will see her, recognize her, and aid in returning her to her family. We had one particularly bad experience with a man named Kevin Halligen (or Richard, as we knew him). Halligen was the CEO of a private-investigation foirm calld Oakley International which was hired by Madeleine's Fund for six months from the end of March 2008..." Assigning a "special status" (arguidos) to Kate and Gerry, in spite of an elementary judicial principle of treating anyone innocent unless and until proven guilty;

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I found this book both compelling and tragic. It is written by Kate, Maddie's Mom, from her (Kate's) point of view and it is told well enough that I can picture things as they happened. It is sad that Kate felt she had to write this book, I suppose, in some way to help clear her and Gerry's names. If they were indeed responsible for Madeleine's accidental death and subsequent cover-up, how did they manage to keep that from the hordes of family and friends who turned up in Portugal to support them? And over five months? If you read this book and nothing else, Kate McCann (or her editors/PRs) will have mostly succeeded in getting the reader on side. Yet despite my earlier empathy towards them, I am now less convinced. WHERE'S ESTELLE? Diggers search woods for ‘French Madeleine McCann’ 18 years after girl, 9, snatched by virgin-obsessed Ogre of Ardennes She then revealed: "I was chatting to Amelie and she said, 'Mummy's sad because Madeleine is not here. But Amelie is here, and Amelie and Sean will always be here.'" Keeping busy is the family's way of coping, though it will never fill the void left by Maddie's absence.

What is admirable is that Kate McCann appears to talk candidly and honestly about some of the negative and potentially scathing treatment that both she and her husband received at the hands of the Portuguese police during a series of interviews where they were near-enough framed as murderers and perpetrators of the crime. Let it be said, many people just would not be able to deal with this in any public or private way whatsoever. I dont think for a minute that either Kate or Gerry had anything to do with Maddie's disappearance. And whatever my thoughts are about the children being left alone in the apartment, it still doesn't take away the fact that someone either went into their apartment and took Maddie, or Maddie wandered out of the apartment and then someone took her. And after all, do not forget the McCanns were not the only ones who left their children alone, the rest of the party did so too each and every evening. The other families in their party must be on their knees thanking god it wasn't their child that was taken.

Then the investigation that followed was made more awkward by the language difficulty and on more than one occasion the McCanns' had to question the translator(s), which did not lead to good relations for a while. The police, too, did not seem as helpful as perhaps they could have been and then, later on when they questioned the McCanns as suspects, or arguidos as they were called, the situation became very tense. Kate is a very down to earth and very intelligent woman. Even before reading it, I have always felt sympathetic to her ordeal. I felt very connected to her throughout the book, and I am frankly sorry for what she is enduring. She is a great mother and her bond with her husband is so beautiful. She writes very well, I think she should try to write other unrelated books as well. Yet our Government - from Blair, Brown, Cameron and now May - has ignored the many inconsistencies as well as litigious nature of the McCanns, throwing yet more taxpayers’ money on this one case. Why? I am sorry but I felt the need to read this book because I had a wariness about The McCanns, especially Kate. This book does not ease all of those. It's awful to think of the poor child whatever happened to her the poor poor girl.