Gone

Gone is a cracklingly good police procedural that starts as a simple carjacking case, but turns into something far more complex. It features Mo Hayder's series detective Jack Caffery, who is a no-nonsense cop in England's West Country.

I'm always wary of missing children stories--films on the subject are almost always bad, as they give in to manipulation. But Gone is different. Instead of centering on the parents' anxiety and grief, it focuses on the police investigation, and in this case the police are constantly behind the maneuvers of the criminal.

That being said, Hayder does explore the parents' situation. Two girls have been snatched, and the perpetrator has also done this to two other families. Eventually Caffery figures out that the kidnappings are not random, and the families must have something in common. Hayder writes a terrific scene in which one of the mothers gathers them all to try to figure out just what the connection is. The dialogue and descriptions are perfect, and you feel like you're in the room with them.

There's a parallel plot involving a detective from the underwater rescue team, Flea Marley, who goes looking for one of the girls in an underground canal and gets trapped. These chapters take the book in a different direction--the plucky survivor--but are also very well done.

I probably missed out on some of the effect of the book because I haven't read any of the other books in the series. Caffery and Marley are covering up a crime that may have been from a different book, and have a previous romantic relationship. I also got the drift that Caffery had a brother who died or went missing. There's a character called The Walking Man, a father who is on a futile but never-ending quest to find his daughter.

But even without previous knowledge I enjoyed this book immensely, and it's the best thriller I've read all year.