Psychological

Fifteen-year-old Billy is missing. He’s been gone for six months, police have no new clues, and the family makes another appeal on air. It doesn’t go well, attesting to the fact the family is falling apart. In actuality, this family was falling apart long before Billy disappeared. The story, though lengthy, is a quick read. The decline of the mental acuity of the mother, Claire, is well done, as she begins to suffer from dissociative amnesia. The arguments between all the family members - husband and wife, son and parents, son with live-in girlfriend - also ring true. The suspense is slow to build, as much of the story is about the decline of the family. The problem I have with this family, as well as with the secondary characters, is none of them are very likable. The parents have allowed their older son’s girlfriend to move in with him in their house. The younger son, Billy, is always in trouble for “tagging,” at school and in public places. They swear at each other, drink to excess, including underage drinking, and are unfaithful. The author does a good job of setting up scenarios to make someone seem guilty in Billy’s disappearance, and then she explains them away. For that feat, she gets four stars from me. ( )

4.5 stars.

The Missing by C.L. Taylor is an incredibly fast-paced and suspenseful mystery about a missing fifteen year old and his mother's attempts to locate him.

Six months after their son Billy vanished without a trace, Claire Wilkinson and her husband Mark are making a another media appearance in hopes of uncovering new information. When their appeal is derailed by their nineteen year old Jake's drunken behavior, the family becomes even more fractured than before. Jake turns to drink to help him cope, his girlfriend, Kira Simmons, who lives with the family, loses herself in her college classes and Mark continues traveling for work. However, Claire begins experiencing inexplicable episodes of amnesia that while deeply troubling, do not distract her from her increasingly frantic efforts to locate Billy.

Written primarily from Claire's perspective, her anguish and worry are palpable as she remains convinced Billy will safely return home. In the aftermath of her first terrifying fugue state, she is of course very concerned about what happened to her, but she does not allow this to keep her doing everything possible to unearth new leads about Billy. Her desperation leads to some very questionable decisions that put her into potentially dangerous situations. Claire refuses to give up hope that Billy is alive and as she tries to find out the truth about what happened to her son, she gradually realizes that she does not know her loved ones as well as she thought.

The unfolding story is interspersed with message exchanges between two unknown people that take place during the months leading up to Billy's disappearance. While it is somewhat easy to surmise one of the authors of the messages is most likely Billy, the other person's identity remains shrouded in mystery. These messages offer a distressing snapshot of Billy's activities with this person and they also provide an intriguing peek into his strained relationships at home.

The Missing is an absolutely spellbinding mystery with a clever plot and a sympathetic yet increasingly unreliable narrator. C.L. Taylor brilliantly keeps readers guessing about whether or not Billy is alive and who might be responsible for his disappearance. The message exchanges are thought-provoking and provide fascinating insight into Billy's life in the months before he vanished. However, the truth about what happened to him is cunningly concealed until the very dramatic and positively stunning conclusion. I highly scintillating psychological thriller to fans of the genre. ( )

I really couldn't get into this book. It just aggravated me. I just couldn't care for any of the characters. It didn't take a lot to figure out what was going on either. I've read another book by this author and it was pretty good so maybe this one was just not for me. ( )

The Missing from C.L. Taylor is a bit of a difficult book for me to review. My views on it, while overwhelmingly positive, are often tempered by seemingly contradictory points. But here goes.

I was initially expecting more of an edge-of-my-seat thriller type of novel and this is not really that type. Some scenes certainly create that effect but on the whole this is a slow burn kind of story. I do think the term gut wrenching is appropriate but with some explanation. When talking about novels we often use that idea to signify something that is both horrible and sudden. While the event of a child going missing is sudden this story picks up months after the disappearance, so we are dealing with the drawn out experience of the many unknowns in such a situation: how, why, who, etc. In real life gut wrenching is generally a wearing down and not a sudden event (though often triggered by such an occurrence). In that respect this is closer to real life than what we regularly find in a novel. If you can adjust your expectations in this regard I believe you will be rewarded.

I saw that some couldn't empathize with the characters because they believed them to all be bad people and liars. They certainly lied but I have never met anyone who hasn't. Unfortunately, we lie far too often to those we love, many times thinking we are doing a greater good than the bad of a small lie. Those little lies can get out of hand, especially during a time of crisis. That, I think, more accurately reflects these characters than simply calling them bad as though we are above such things. Would I like to think I would not have told the same lies in their situation? Sure. But I to claim to know, well, that is simply unrealistic. Different lies will affect each reader differently, there were a couple that I really didn't like, but I am not one of the characters and the stories they told fit with their personalities so I was able to understand them even when I disagreed with them. If you really just need one character in a novel to be a perfect angel, then this might not be for you, these are written as real people going through tough times. No angels here.

What was probably the biggest negative for me is also something that was necessary in order to show the anguish as well as the story behind each character's own personal hell. It seemed like the set up was taking forever until I shifted my expectation and realized that for this novel it is the journey that moves us at least as much as the resolution. Once I made that shift I found myself much more involved in the story. But at first I just kept wondering when the action would start. This is a psychological thriller but rather than a sharp rise to a resolution the psychological suspense is developed and drawn out (in a good way).

All in all I would recommend this book to readers of psychological thrillers with the understanding that this is about the inner workings of Claire's mind (and heart) and, through her eyes, the psychological baggage of the other characters.

Reviewed from a copy made available through Goodreads First Reads. ( )