The Missing

Categories: Staff Picks , Fiction

Here’s a lovely book.  If you enjoyed Serena or The Well and the Mine recently, try this wonderfully moving novel, The Missing, by Tim Gautreaux, set a few years earlier in a nearby part of the South.

Sam Simoneaux gets the nickname “Lucky” in France, where his troopship lands just as the armistice is declared in 1918.  He doesn’t leave the war entirely unscathed—a few weeks of clearing ordnance and an injury he causes to a little French girl haunt him—but he gets to go home to his wife.

But much of his life doesn’t seem quite that lucky.  He was orphaned as a baby when a backwoods Arkansas family took vengeance against his Cajun father and slaughtered the rest of the family. 

And now, though he has a nice job as a department store floorwalker, chance and a mistake give his life a painful new turn—a couple’s young girl is kidnapped in the store on his watch.

Sam joins the riverboat where the couple work as musicians, hoping to help them trace their child.  He helps run security during the boat’s sometimes violent dance cruises, and he fills in now and then at the piano. 

All the while, though, he’s looking for clues as to what happened to the missing girl.  And fate takes several more painful, personal turns before he can try to reunite her with her family.  She may end up almost as much an orphan as he is himself.

It’s a beautiful piece of regional fiction—you’ll have riverboat engines and train whistles and raucous dancehall fights ringing in your head before the deeply peaceful backwoods quiet that ends the book.