Review: The Missing

Chris Mooney is a writer I have followed for many years. He debuted in the UK with ‘Deviant Ways’ and ‘World Without End’, but we didn’t get to see his Edgar Nominated ‘Missing Sarah’ on our shores but the fine people at Penguin UK are about to change things a tad. Coming out shortly as a PB original is this terrifying serial killer opus ‘The Missing’ which features a hunt back across time and the regional US for the locations of a score of missing women who have been abducted and then placed on the FBI Missing list.

The key with Mooney is how he brings characterisation into play as a plot device. Enter a young teenager named Darby McCormick and her two friends Melanie and Stacey who witness what they believe to be a murder in the woods. But the killer also sees them. A hunt ensures and Darby becomes traumatised seeing what happens to her friends when the killer tracks them down, but she survives [and the reasons for her survival are only revealed in the cork-screw ending].

Darby becomes an FBI investigator as fate and destiny are often interrelated, and then a case lands on her desk that has the familiar hallmarks of the one that traumatised her childhood. Abductions continue but nothing seems to link the missing women, and there is a lack of clues, but Darby thinks there must be a link to her own past. Red Herrings abound with a white supremacist the favourite as the abductor, but Darby considers that this case could have a number of other linked killers; people with a fractured past, people with disassociated minds, people who lurk in the blackness of psychosis. This portion gave me real chills, as did the banality of evil portrayed in this bullet-train thriller.

If velocity is anything to go by, then this book sits on top of the heap. I read this book within two hours as the plot is like an express train, with no stops between start and finish. And, watch out for the ending, because I didn’t see the sucker punch coming at the climax. An absolutely excellent addition to the serial killer sub-genre and I’m so glad to see Mooney published in the UK again, and perhaps Penguin will publish ‘Remembering Sarah’ [for UK readers] as it is one of my favourite reads of recent memory. – Ali Karim.

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Ali Karim - RAM

Book Review: The Missing