A young woman has gone missing, vanished in a dead-end alley with no apparent way out, and DCI Julia Day heads up the investigation seeking to find her. She knows that the odds of finding a missing person plummet as time goes by, but her desire to solve the impossible mystery is interrupted by an unexpected threat. Someone wants Julia to frame an apparently unrelated individual named Matthew James for the kidnapping, and this threat carries a terrible consequence if Julia refuses – the revelation of a secret that Julia has been keeping for the last year, one that would end her career and worse, send her own daughter to jail. Julia feels she has no choice, she must go through with the frame-up, building an increasingly unstable web of lies as she goes on. But she also wants to discover who could have possibly discovered her secret and why they want to frame Matthew James, and what she finds only drags her deeper into mysteries she never could have imagined.
Just Another Missing Person is not only a twisting and surprising mystery novel, but a deeply felt analysis of its characters. Presenting numerous views on parents and their children – Julia, who would send someone to jail unwillingly to protect her daughter; Matthew and his mother, who struggles with her son’s secretiveness until she’s no longer sure what he might or might not have done; and Lewis, whose grief over his missing daughter drives him to desperation – the book is more than the typical police procedural. Fans of stories that blend mystery with psychological insight and family relationships, such as The Whispers or the works of Tana French, should find their way to this one. – Michelle (Sunset)
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