MISSING

They say the first 24 hours are the most crucial when trying to locate a missing person. These stories don’t have that luxury…

I was originally drawn to the book Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran because the story takes place in New Orleans and I have a certain fascination with the city. New Orleans is beautiful and tragic, stunning and dirty…everything all at once.  The story and its characters are very much the same way. It’s centered on Private detective Claire Dewitt who isn’t someone you can put in a box; she is anything but normal, and her methods are even more unusual. She takes a case searching in post-Katrina New Orleans for Vic Willing, a prosecutor notorious for getting the bad guys when they go free, which happens more often than not.

In 1991 Charlotte and Nora are eleven years old, they have a babysitter named Rose, and they are obsessed with the Time Life books Mysteries of the Unknown collection. In Search of the Rose Notes by Emily Arsenault follows the life of these two young girls and their missing babysitter, Rose. The story goes back and forth between the past and fifteen years later when the body of Rose is found. Now in their early twenties, the girls will have to overcome what they thought they knew to uncover the real truth behind Rose’s disappearance.

After covering the mean streets of Cleveland, newspaper reporter Stacey Flynn doesn’t expect too much excitement in the small upstate New York town of Haeden, but when Wendy White goes missing and shows up in a ditch five months later she thinks for once she might have some big news to write about. In this town though no one will talk to her believing it couldn’t be one of them that did such an awful deed. Stacey does the best she can to bring the community around by exploring the underbelly of the town, but only eccentric fifteen year old Alice Piper really listens.  In So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman we see how ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away, but will continue to spread until lives become intertwined through tragedy.