Gone Missing in Harlem
A Novel
-
- £13.99
-
- £13.99
Publisher Description
In her anticipated second novel, Karla Holloway evokes the resilience of a family whose journey traces the river of America’s early twentieth century. The Mosby family, like other thousands, migrate from the loblolly-scented Carolinas north to the Harlem of their aspirations—with its promise of freedom and opportunities, sunlit boulevards, and elegant societies.
The family arrives as Harlem staggers under the flu pandemic that follows the First World War. DeLilah Mosby and her daughter, Selma, meet difficulties with backbone and resolve to make a home for themselves in the city, and Selma has a baby, Chloe. As the Great Depression creeps across the world at the close of the twenties, however, the farsighted see hard times coming.
The panic of the early thirties is embodied in the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of the nation’s dashing young aviator, Charles Lindbergh. A transfixed public follows the manhunt in the press and on the radio. Then Chloe goes missing—but her disappearance does not draw the same attention. Wry and perceptive Weldon Haynie Thomas, the city’s first “colored” policeman, takes the case.
The urgent investigation tests Thomas’s abilities to draw out the secrets Harlem harbors, untangling the color-coded connections and relationships that keep company with greed, ghosts, and grief. With nuanced characters, lush historical detail, and a lyrical voice, Gone Missing in Harlem affirms the restoring powers of home and family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 1932 Lindbergh baby kidnapping provides the backdrop for a less sensational kidnapping in Holloway's superior sequel to 2019's A Death in Harlem. Selma Mosby parks her infant daughter, Chloe, just outside a Harlem grocery store as she goes inside to pay for some fruit. To Selma's horror, when she returns a few moments later, Chloe's gone. An unidentified 30-year-old pockmarked white man wearing horn-rimmed glasses was seen watching the store's exterior just before the disappearance. Flashbacks reveal that this person, identified only as Boss, is a numbers runner who employs Black boys in Harlem to collect cash for him, including Selma's brother. Holloway gradually reveals why Boss was on the scene at the time Chloe vanished. The search of Weldon Thomas, the neighborhood's first Black policeman, for the truth behind the abduction packs an emotional punch, as does the larger sociological picture of the disparate treatment and attention given to a missing child of color, in contrast to the national outcry about Charles Lindbergh Jr. This works both as a page-turner and a portrait of a vanished era.
