Book Review: Missing Persons

Reviewed By: A. Rolfingsmeier

Missing Persons     Amazon US PB Amazon US HC Amazon Canada PB Amazon Canada HC
Stephen White
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Psychological Suspense   Thriller
Series: Alan Gregory # 13
Dutton (Penguin Group), 2005, 391 pages

On Christmas Eve, 1996, in an affluent neighborhood of Boulder, Colorado, a young beauty queen was murdered inside her home. Lack of footprints in the snow blanketing the home’s yard should have made it obvious to police that the killer was a member of the child’s household. Public ridicule equated the Boulder police with the Keystone Kops.

Eight years later, on a snowy Christmas Eve, another young girl is missing. Holiday television coverage of a garish home light display shows another yard with no footprints in the snow. Mallory Miller is a classmate of the more famous girl, who lived blocks away. The Boulder, Colorado police do not want to fumble the investigation of this one. Of more concern to psychologist, Dr. Alan Gregory, is the unexpected death of a colleague under mysterious circumstances. Neither case is what it seems.

A psychologist treats patients who obsess over the correct method to load dishes in the dishwasher, those so self-absorbed they become angry when their therapist’s death means finding new treatment, and those whose pathology all but threatens normal social functioning. Boorish and self-centered behavior is not confined to the couch, as Dr. Gregory learns in his interactions with a certain member of the police department. In helping friend and sharp Boulder police department detective Sam Purdy disentangle the twin mysteries of Mallory Miller’s disappearance and Dr. Hannah Grant’s death, White pulls the reader onto the shifting paths between sanity and madness, between revenge and salvation. No one, including Gregory and Purdy, remains unaffected by the journey.

A. Rolfingsmeier

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, A. Rolfingsmeier