The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

The Trouble with Goats and Sheep is a 2015 mystery and coming-of-age novel by British author and psychiatrist Joanna Cannon. Set in 1976, the novel follows ten-year-old Grace Bennett as she and her best friend, Tilly attempt to investigate the disappearance of a neighbor, Mrs. Creasy.

The novel opens in the home of Sylvia and Derek Bennett, where they are discussing the sudden disappearance of a neighbor, Margaret Creasy. Mr. Bennett makes a few sardonic remarks about Margaret’s husband, and his ten-year-old daughter, Grace, concludes that Mrs. Creasy has been murdered. As Grace walks to school with her best friend, Tilly, the two girls discuss disappearance:

“‘He said that Mrs. Creasy is officially a Missing Person.’



“‘Missing from what?’

“Thinking made my feet slower. ‘Her life, I suppose.’

“‘How can you be missing from your own life?’



“I slowed a little more. ‘Missing from the life you belong in.’

“Tilly stopped to pull up her socks. ‘I wonder how you know which one that is.’”

A week passes and Mrs. Creasy does not return. Everyone on the Avenue (the street where Grace and Tilly live) is gossiping about her disappearance. The consensus is that Mrs. Creasy has probably been murdered by Walter Bishop, an eccentric loner who lives on the Avenue. All of the Avenue’s residents believe that Walter is a “pervert” who stole a baby girl in 1967 and left her in a local park.



Grace is troubled by the disappearance: she wonders how and why people disappear, and what the difference is between disappearing and leaving. She asks the local vicar why people disappear. He replies that it is because some people stray from the path. He reassures her that if her neighbors believe in God, they won’t be lost.

Grace asks her babysitter, the older Mrs. Morton, if she believes in God. Mrs. Morton dismisses this as a silly question.

Enlisting Tilly to help, Grace dons her Brownie uniform and goes door-to-door looking for God. Along the way, she begins to discover that many of her neighbors have secrets.



As they discover their neighbors’ secrets, Grace and Tilly find themselves on the trail of Mrs. Creasy, because Mrs. Creasy was a well-liked woman who knew many of these secrets herself. Many of the neighbors are worried that wherever Mrs. Creasy has gone, she might have gone there to expose their secrets.

These secrets range from the fact that Brian Roper is illiterate to the story of Eric Lamb helping his wife to die when she was terminally ill. However, one secret involves many of the Avenue’s residents, and it is the most incendiary secret of all.

In 1967, after Walter was accused of abducting a baby—along the way, Grace discovers that this baby was her—his house mysteriously burned down, while he and his elderly mother were supposed to be on holiday. In fact, they had returned due to his mother’s illness, and she was killed in the fire. It is widely suspected that the house was set alight by one of the neighbors, but no one knows whom. Mrs. Bennett is known to have suggested that Walter would be forced to move away from the Avenue if he no longer had a house. Harold Forbes is known to have suggested a fire. However, both deny setting the fire. Some people wonder whether Mrs. Creasy’s disappearance has something to do with the fire: she might have known who was responsible.



Grace finds God, in the form of a creosote stain that looks a bit like Jesus. Excited, the neighbors begin a vigil in the driveway where the stain is located, squabbling over who gets to place their folding deck chair closest to the image of Christ. Tensions rise, and when Mrs. Creasy returns to the neighborhood, all the Avenue’s secrets spill out.

The Avenue learns that Mrs. Morton was the one who took Grace from the house in 1967: anxious that she had taken the girl without her mother’s permission, she lied and said that she had found Grace in the park. The allegation against Walter is false.

Mrs. Creasy reveals that Mrs. Forbes and Mrs. Daikin set the fire at Walter’s house. Mrs. Daikin did not realize that Walter and his mother had returned home, but Mrs. Forbes knew they were there: she had seen them arrive in a taxi. Mrs. Creasy has revealed what she knows to the police.



Through the eyes of her young protagonist, Cannon paints a portrait of suburban England in the mid-twentieth century, revealing the secrets and traumas of ordinary lives. The Trouble with Goats and Sheep was described as “an astute, engaging debut” by Publishers’ Weekly. The title refers to the New Testament parable (in which the good and the evil—the sheep and the goats—are divided on Judgment Day).