![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Missing Person by Sarah Lotz
The Blurb On The Back:
Missing-linc.com comprises a group of misfit sleuths scattered across the States. Their macabre passion is giving names to the unidentified dead. When Ellie Caine starts investigating the corpse known as the Boy in the Dress, the Boy’s killer decides to join the group. The closer they get to the truth, the closer he will get to them.
The Boy was Teddy Ryan. He was meant to have been killed in a car crash in the west of Ireland in 1989. Only he wasn’t. There is no grave in Galway and Teddy was writing letters from New York a year after he supposedly died. But one night he met a man in a Minnesota bar and vanished off the face of the earth.
Teddy’s nephew, Shaun, is no hero, but he is determined to solve the thirty-year-old mystery. He joins forces with the disparate members of Missing-linc to hunt down the killer. The only problem: the killer will be with them every step of the way …
20-something Shaun Ryan has been unable to get his life together ever since his mum died unexpectedly from a brain aneurysm. The fund she’d encouraged him to save so that he could go travelling was blown on booze and parties and now he’s stuck working in a bookshop in Wicklow, Ireland (the same job his mum used to have) and looking after a dog called Daphne. The closest thing he has to a relationship is on-off sex with a closeted married man called Brendan and although his aunt Janice and uncle Donny live in town, he’s always been the black sheep in the family because he was born out of wedlock (which is rich considering his uncle Donny’s links to serious crime).
Everything changes though when he’s visited by Johnny McKinnon, an old friend of Shaun’s uncle Teddy. Shaun has always believed that his uncle Teddy died in a car accident and is buried in Kilkenny but Johnny reveals that Teddy - an out and proud gay man - went to New York after a big fight with his family. When Janice and Donny reluctantly confirm Johnny’s story, Shaun finds a new purpose in trying to track his uncle Teddy down, even though no one in Wicklow has heard from him.
Shaun’s search leads him to a website called missing-linc, where internet sleuths try to identify the bodies of John and Jane Does. Run by the abrasive Chris (a professional driver who became a wheelchair user following an accident), the site has restricted itself to identifying bodies after an unauthorised armchair investigation by a user called rainbowbrite went badly wrong. But when Chris sees Shaun’s plea for help, she realises that Teddy bears a remarkable resemblance to a body known online as ‘The Boy In The Dress’ due to the fact that he was found in 1996 in Minnesota wearing a distinctive dress. The Boy In The Dress was also a case that rainbowbrite (real name Ellie) had done a lot of work on due to the fact that it was found near where she lives with her husband Noah (a prison governor) and twin sons. Against her better judgment, Chris invites Ellie back to the site and together with a retired police detective known on-line as bobbiecowell, they decide to dig into what happened to Teddy and how he ended up in Minnesota.
The only problem is that bobbiecowell knows exactly what happened to Teddy because he killed him. Now that he has an inside role in the investigation, he’s determined to stop Shaun, Chris and Ellie from discovering the truth, no matter what it takes …
Sarah Lotz’s standalone thriller makes the most of its original hook in that you know who the killer is from very early on so although the main story turns both on other characters discovering the truth, it’s given emotional depth by the slow reveal of family secrets and has strong themes of identity and trust. Although the ending didn’t fully work for me, I would read more about these characters and am interested in reading Lotz’s other work.
Having read Lotz’s debut novel UNDER GROUND (which was co-written with Louis Greenberg) and not really rated it, if I’m being honest, then I have to say that I was not expecting a huge amount from this novel. However I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised not least because whereas I found the characters in UNDER GROUND to be stereotypical and formulaic, the characters here are well rounded and feel more believable.
Shaun is well drawn as a somewhat lost soul, out of step with the other people in his small Irish town and uncertain what to do with his life given that he is still grieving the mother he adored. When he meets Johnny and learns the truth about his uncle Teddy, I believed in the way he saw this as giving him new direction - if only in the hope that Teddy is still alive and can lift him out of his current misery. His relationship with the hysterical and disapproving Janice and sinister Donny made sense in this context, as does the reluctant friendship that develops between him and Johnny, Teddy’s best friend. What Lotz does particularly well is slowly reveal the secrets that Johnny and Shaun’s family have been keeping and ties this in with the on-line investigation.
For the most part Lotz also does a good job of building bobbiecowell’s character. The reader learns very early on that he is the killer and it’s equally clear that the persona he’s created on-line is very different to his real set-up. I enjoyed the slow reveal of the truth about his life and I liked the fact that Lotz doesn’t show him as being some kind of mastermind - he’s narcissistic and reckless as much as he is sly and clever - so a lot of the fun comes from having him realise when he’s made a mistake and try to distract or cover up for it while at the same time manipulating users on the site. What helps here is his friendship with rainbowbrite who Lotz shows as a somewhat frazzled woman for whom the website gave a purpose and who is well meaning, even if she makes mistakes. Although I didn’t quite believe in her relationship with Noah (who has the patience of a saint), I did believe in the fondness she has for Bobbie and I think Lotz does well at showing how people on-line are looking for connections, which can make them reckless and open to manipulation. Special mention should go to the sections of the book structured as private chats and emails between the characters and comments on the site because they have an authenticity to them that helps the reader to buy into the overall story.
Lotz splits the narration between Shaun, Bobbie, rainbowbrite and Chris, which helps to maintain the pace. Chris’s sections are probably the ones that left me wanting more - Lotz weaves in the fact that she started the site because of the disappearance of her mother and although someone has been trolling her with possible details of that disappearance there is no closure to that storyline at the end of the book. If Lotz wanted to return to the characters in the future to explore that further, then I’d certainly be interested in reading it because the brittle but aggressive Chris is someone with a lot of potential given that she’s intuitive and diligent and cares a lot about trying to give people closure and dignity to the unidentified.
On the minus side, there were things in the book that did not ring true. One of these was bobbie’s relationship with his girlfriend’s daughter, Tasha, who is simply too precocious for me to buy into as a 9-year-old but also because I don’t think Lotz is clear enough in why Bobbie takes such an interest in her given how long he and Tasha’s mum have been dating. The main problem, however, is the ending, which I don’t think Lotz managed to stick. There’s a lot of evasion and events happening off page and being recounted later, which made it unsatisfying - not least because Lotz opts not to have an explanation from bobbie’s point of view, which could have given clarity.
Although that’s a shame, there is still a lot here to enjoy and I would definitely be keen to check out Lotz’s other work on the strength of this.
The Verdict:
Sarah Lotz’s standalone thriller makes the most of its original hook in that you know who the killer is from very early on so although the main story turns both on other characters discovering the truth, it’s given emotional depth by the slow reveal of family secrets and has strong themes of identity and trust. Although the ending didn’t fully work for me, I would read more about these characters and am interested in reading Lotz’s other work.
Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.
Missing-linc.com comprises a group of misfit sleuths scattered across the States. Their macabre passion is giving names to the unidentified dead. When Ellie Caine starts investigating the corpse known as the Boy in the Dress, the Boy’s killer decides to join the group. The closer they get to the truth, the closer he will get to them.
The Boy was Teddy Ryan. He was meant to have been killed in a car crash in the west of Ireland in 1989. Only he wasn’t. There is no grave in Galway and Teddy was writing letters from New York a year after he supposedly died. But one night he met a man in a Minnesota bar and vanished off the face of the earth.
Teddy’s nephew, Shaun, is no hero, but he is determined to solve the thirty-year-old mystery. He joins forces with the disparate members of Missing-linc to hunt down the killer. The only problem: the killer will be with them every step of the way …
20-something Shaun Ryan has been unable to get his life together ever since his mum died unexpectedly from a brain aneurysm. The fund she’d encouraged him to save so that he could go travelling was blown on booze and parties and now he’s stuck working in a bookshop in Wicklow, Ireland (the same job his mum used to have) and looking after a dog called Daphne. The closest thing he has to a relationship is on-off sex with a closeted married man called Brendan and although his aunt Janice and uncle Donny live in town, he’s always been the black sheep in the family because he was born out of wedlock (which is rich considering his uncle Donny’s links to serious crime).
Everything changes though when he’s visited by Johnny McKinnon, an old friend of Shaun’s uncle Teddy. Shaun has always believed that his uncle Teddy died in a car accident and is buried in Kilkenny but Johnny reveals that Teddy - an out and proud gay man - went to New York after a big fight with his family. When Janice and Donny reluctantly confirm Johnny’s story, Shaun finds a new purpose in trying to track his uncle Teddy down, even though no one in Wicklow has heard from him.
Shaun’s search leads him to a website called missing-linc, where internet sleuths try to identify the bodies of John and Jane Does. Run by the abrasive Chris (a professional driver who became a wheelchair user following an accident), the site has restricted itself to identifying bodies after an unauthorised armchair investigation by a user called rainbowbrite went badly wrong. But when Chris sees Shaun’s plea for help, she realises that Teddy bears a remarkable resemblance to a body known online as ‘The Boy In The Dress’ due to the fact that he was found in 1996 in Minnesota wearing a distinctive dress. The Boy In The Dress was also a case that rainbowbrite (real name Ellie) had done a lot of work on due to the fact that it was found near where she lives with her husband Noah (a prison governor) and twin sons. Against her better judgment, Chris invites Ellie back to the site and together with a retired police detective known on-line as bobbiecowell, they decide to dig into what happened to Teddy and how he ended up in Minnesota.
The only problem is that bobbiecowell knows exactly what happened to Teddy because he killed him. Now that he has an inside role in the investigation, he’s determined to stop Shaun, Chris and Ellie from discovering the truth, no matter what it takes …
Sarah Lotz’s standalone thriller makes the most of its original hook in that you know who the killer is from very early on so although the main story turns both on other characters discovering the truth, it’s given emotional depth by the slow reveal of family secrets and has strong themes of identity and trust. Although the ending didn’t fully work for me, I would read more about these characters and am interested in reading Lotz’s other work.
Having read Lotz’s debut novel UNDER GROUND (which was co-written with Louis Greenberg) and not really rated it, if I’m being honest, then I have to say that I was not expecting a huge amount from this novel. However I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised not least because whereas I found the characters in UNDER GROUND to be stereotypical and formulaic, the characters here are well rounded and feel more believable.
Shaun is well drawn as a somewhat lost soul, out of step with the other people in his small Irish town and uncertain what to do with his life given that he is still grieving the mother he adored. When he meets Johnny and learns the truth about his uncle Teddy, I believed in the way he saw this as giving him new direction - if only in the hope that Teddy is still alive and can lift him out of his current misery. His relationship with the hysterical and disapproving Janice and sinister Donny made sense in this context, as does the reluctant friendship that develops between him and Johnny, Teddy’s best friend. What Lotz does particularly well is slowly reveal the secrets that Johnny and Shaun’s family have been keeping and ties this in with the on-line investigation.
For the most part Lotz also does a good job of building bobbiecowell’s character. The reader learns very early on that he is the killer and it’s equally clear that the persona he’s created on-line is very different to his real set-up. I enjoyed the slow reveal of the truth about his life and I liked the fact that Lotz doesn’t show him as being some kind of mastermind - he’s narcissistic and reckless as much as he is sly and clever - so a lot of the fun comes from having him realise when he’s made a mistake and try to distract or cover up for it while at the same time manipulating users on the site. What helps here is his friendship with rainbowbrite who Lotz shows as a somewhat frazzled woman for whom the website gave a purpose and who is well meaning, even if she makes mistakes. Although I didn’t quite believe in her relationship with Noah (who has the patience of a saint), I did believe in the fondness she has for Bobbie and I think Lotz does well at showing how people on-line are looking for connections, which can make them reckless and open to manipulation. Special mention should go to the sections of the book structured as private chats and emails between the characters and comments on the site because they have an authenticity to them that helps the reader to buy into the overall story.
Lotz splits the narration between Shaun, Bobbie, rainbowbrite and Chris, which helps to maintain the pace. Chris’s sections are probably the ones that left me wanting more - Lotz weaves in the fact that she started the site because of the disappearance of her mother and although someone has been trolling her with possible details of that disappearance there is no closure to that storyline at the end of the book. If Lotz wanted to return to the characters in the future to explore that further, then I’d certainly be interested in reading it because the brittle but aggressive Chris is someone with a lot of potential given that she’s intuitive and diligent and cares a lot about trying to give people closure and dignity to the unidentified.
On the minus side, there were things in the book that did not ring true. One of these was bobbie’s relationship with his girlfriend’s daughter, Tasha, who is simply too precocious for me to buy into as a 9-year-old but also because I don’t think Lotz is clear enough in why Bobbie takes such an interest in her given how long he and Tasha’s mum have been dating. The main problem, however, is the ending, which I don’t think Lotz managed to stick. There’s a lot of evasion and events happening off page and being recounted later, which made it unsatisfying - not least because Lotz opts not to have an explanation from bobbie’s point of view, which could have given clarity.
Although that’s a shame, there is still a lot here to enjoy and I would definitely be keen to check out Lotz’s other work on the strength of this.
The Verdict:
Sarah Lotz’s standalone thriller makes the most of its original hook in that you know who the killer is from very early on so although the main story turns both on other characters discovering the truth, it’s given emotional depth by the slow reveal of family secrets and has strong themes of identity and trust. Although the ending didn’t fully work for me, I would read more about these characters and am interested in reading Lotz’s other work.
Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.