Review Sneak Peek: “…there’s a joke in there somewhere about presuming a genre and missing the mark, but I can’t quite nail that one down.”
- Author: Susie Steiner
- Length: 369 pages
- Literary Fiction/Mystery
Summary:
Detective Sergeant Manon Bradshaw listens to the low hum of her police radio as she tries to fall asleep after an underwhelming first date when a call for a missing person comes in. Edith Hind, a 24-year old Cambridge graduate student, is gone without a trace and it’s not long before the case gains media attention. Can Cambridgeshire police put the pieces together or will the Hind family be doomed to the purgatory faced by families of missing people who are never found?
My Thoughts:
I’m going to start this review by saying that I picked up this book with the wrong expectations (so very wrong).
Like not this wrong, but close.
I assumed this book would focus on the mysterious disappearance of Edith Hind and the investigation thereof. Be warned, this book is not your typical police procedural or crime fiction. I’ll get into why, but first, a few formatting details!
This novel is told from the third-person limited point of view, but it shifts the character of focus each chapter. We hear the story from the perspective of DS Manon Bradshaw: the investigating detective, DC Davy Walker: an officer also on the case, Miriam Hind: the mother of our missing woman, and Helena Reed: Edith Hind’s best friend. Manon is definitely the (flawed) protagonist of this story, so her chapters are frequent and most of the time longer than our supporting cast members. And although the author will add what day of the week it is at the beginning of some chapters, I only really could tell how much time had passed when the characters acknowledged how long it had been since Edith went missing (might be my bad, I wasn’t really committing the days to memory for the first half of the book *shrug*). Not that that was an issue, but just know that unless you track the days, you might lose sight of the timeline after a while since Steiner provides no dates at the chapter intros.
Now, let’s discuss my error in expectations (refer back to monster book gif for visual representation). I read the summary for this book and thought, “Why yes, I am in the mood for a good criminal mystery.” I did not think, “Why yes, I am in the mood for a deep dive into the personal life of a 39-year old, unhappily single woman.” I shouldn’t be too hard on myself since the summary I read only mentioned the one date and then brushed it off as if that topic would not be returned to for the rest of the novel. Hey, I did the same thing in my summary! Am I passive aggressively punishing people who skim read my reviews? Probably not, but who can be certain since this is a mystery review and I have to avoid spoilers religiously (but really no, I just wanted to keep the summary short, I swear!).
Anyway, the book starts off promisingly, with a strong focus on the details of Edith’s disappearance and how the department is investigating. But the middle half of the book slows things down and focuses more on each character’s personal issues. And for Manon, the character that gets the most page space, that is her somewhat desperate search for a romantic partner. Now in some ways this is realistic for missing persons cases where the trail runs cold (not the “my biological clock is ticking like this!” *STOMP! STOMP! STOMP!* part, but the dip in case developments and drifting focus of those not directly involved), but I wasn’t prepared since I had certain genre presumptions. Just be warned that a lot of this book zones in on the somewhat cringy dating life of our emotionally fragile protagonist. Not that the other characters have rosy personal lives (turns out everyone’s miserable in their own way, which now that I’m typing it sounds very sad). So, I guess, don’t go into this one hoping for the mystery to be the centerpiece. Like I said the middle section shifts focus entirely, to the point where it almost felt as though the mystery would be left off.
Another side effect of the literary fiction type character focus rather than plot focus was that the mystery was not obviously solvable for the majority of the book…or really even a little solvable. In addition to that, the author kept initial clues to a bare minimum. In fact, I spent the front half of the book with no real clue what happened. That helped keep me going through the middle portion of the novel (I have a compulsion to solve mysteries), but also made some of the leaps made by detectives seem tenuous at best. I won’t give details, but there were moments where I was scratching my head wondering, “But why would you assume these things are connected at all?”
Really I’m having trouble describing Missing, Presumed properly since the whole thing left me feeling a little “meh.” It might have just been a case of mistaken genre (there’s a joke in there somewhere about presuming a genre and missing the mark, but I can’t quite nail that one down) like I’ve said because the writing style wasn’t bad, but neither the mystery nor the characters were especially impressive to me. I don’t do ratings, but I think the best way to express my feelings about this one is three out of five stars (not good, not bad, just….meh). But I don’t want to entirely put everyone off just because I wasn’t enamored with this one. I’ve seen plenty of positive reviews, so if anything that I’ve described (as minimal as my descriptions are this go around) sounds like something that would pique your interest, then I recommend checking out some additional reviews.
(Cover art source: Amazon)
The Solo Book Clubber 