The Missing: A Novel

"This is a much more straightforward narrative, mostly from the viewpoint of his mother. A 15-year-old boy goes missing in the middle of the night. Six months on, no one has managed to figure out where he has gone. This is a classic missing-person narrative: all the trails have led nowhere, all the trails have gone cold. What we find out as we meet his family is that they’ve all got secrets and they’re all feeling guilty about something. They’re all blaming themselves for the disappearance. Threaded through the narrative are these online exchanges between two people with typical anonymous usernames, so you don’t know who they are. C. L. Taylor does a great job of using these conversations—where you’re not exactly sure who is talking or what they are talking about—to throw you off the scent and keep you intrigued. One of the things I really loved about this book is that it’s got a really powerful and emotional ending. I’m trying not to give anything away, but I completely didn’t guess what the truth was. And it’s so believable, there’s nothing far-fetched, you don’t have to suspend your disbelief. You can see this happening in real life. It’s a long book, about 500 pages, and the way she leads you through it is so skilfully done. It’s a great example of a missing-person thriller where things are resolved, and in a way where 99% of readers won’t guess the ending. It’s really, really good. I’ve read all of her books and I think this is still my favourite one. I’d say they overlap. I tend to think of psychological thrillers as a type of domestic suspense. The main character tends not to be a detective or a private investigator. They’ll be an ordinary person who has found themselves in some kind of situation—maybe a mystery, like a missing family member or they suspect their in-laws might have been murdered. Something like that. Gone Girl and Girl on the Train are probably the best-known examples of psychological thrillers. In Gone Girl , you’ve got a toxic marriage, and you see it through the points of view of both the husband and the wife. You know that something terrible has happened, but you’re not really sure what. In Girl on the Train , you’ve got someone who thinks they’ve witnessed a crime, and they’re trying to figure it out. These are different from detective novels or police procedurals in that they feature ordinary characters. They don’t have to feature psychologists or show deep psychological insight—or not on the surface, anyway—but it’s always there. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The other interesting thing in The Missing is that the main character, Claire, keeps slipping into fugue states. There are bits in the book where she wakes up with no idea what has happened, where she’s been, or what she’s done. So that adds an extra layer to the mystery. The character and the reader don’t know what she’s done, and it makes you wonder whether she is the one with responsibility for her son’s disappearance."