I did not expect to love Bare Bones.

So I approached Nicole Engelbrecht’s latest true-crime book with hesitation. A collection of South African missing-person and murder cases – many unsolved – hardly sounded like enjoyable reading. But once I started, I could not stop.

Engelbrecht, creator of the popular True Crime South Africa podcast, revisits cold cases she has previously investigated, returning to old leads and interviews and revealing information that has not been made public before.

The cases are horrifying and deeply unsettling. Yet Bare Bones never feels exploitative.

What impressed me most was Engelbrecht’s compassion for the victims and their families. She treats them with dignity and respect, never losing sight of the people behind the cases. She mentions that she once considered journalism as a career and I imagine she would have been a great fit.

The book also puts the very real limitations of our police service under the spotlight. Cases stall, opportunities are lost and families can spend years searching for answers. More encouragingly, Engelbrecht shows how advances in technology are opening new avenues in cases that once appeared hopeless.

My biggest takeaway was sobering: If someone I loved disappeared, I would want an independent investigator involved as quickly as possible.

One case particularly disturbed me. Engelbrecht maps the area surrounding a missing girl’s home and reveals that, although it was not known when she disappeared, at least three later-convicted paedophiles had been living within a few streets of her at the time of her disappearance.

It is a chilling reminder that we rarely know everything about the people living around us. Danger does not necessarily look dangerous, nor does it always exist somewhere far removed from our own communities.

Horrifying, authentic and chilling, Bare Bones gripped me from beginning to end.