Missing Persons

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Severn Gamble drops his wife Margot at the corner near the Justice Building on a stormy Tuesday evening.

Severn Gamble drops his wife Margot at the corner near the Justice Building on a stormy Tuesday evening. She's going inside to pick up a typing job — a two-minute errand. He waits. The rain comes down hard. She never comes back out.

No one saw her enter. No one saw her leave. The envelope she came to collect is still sitting on the lobby desk.

So begins one of the most gripping novels Jack Olsen ever wrote — a psychological thriller set inside a decaying Pacific Northwest city where people are vanishing without a trace, starting with a woman, then a child, then a judge in her robes. The Justice Building is full of police. Nobody can explain it.

Into the hunt come two mismatched detectives. Johnny Boon is a forty-year-old homicide sergeant with a talent for alienating superiors and a marriage that just quietly collapsed; he's case-hardened, sardonic, and better at his job than he lets on. Tally Wickham is young, sharp, and relentless, the kind of cop who searches elevator shafts at four in the morning and won't let anything drop. Together they are about as compatible as oil and water. Together they are the best hope anyone has.

As the search deepens and the list of missing grows, Gamble descends into something darker than grief — an obsession that takes him places no husband should have to go.

Vivid, propulsive, and deeply unsettling, Missing Persons shows Jack Olsen bringing the same intimate precision that made his true crime work famous to a world of pure fiction. The nightmares here are invented. They don't feel that way.