The Missing Man

Gone Girl meets The Big Sleep: "Flowing prose has the sense of murderous urgency, reminiscent that of classical hard-boiled mysteries."

For the longest time, nobody even realized that Richard Barnes had joined the ranks of the 2,000 people who go missing each day in the United States.

It is the middle of yet another cloud-free, rain-free, pseudo-idyllic summer in Los Angeles. It's the heart of the modern depression and NPR is playing interviews with those affected on the hour, every hour. It's on just such a day that Jack Pelham, a freelance reporter for a paper you haven't heard of, and a man whose personal and professional life is crumbling around him, is sent to interview a woman who reported that her husband went missing - six months ago.

Even with that peculiarity, Jack goes in thinking it's a nothing story, and he keeps thinking that right up until the moment he's accosted in by men brandishing firearms demanding to know everything he knows about the missing man. It's from that moment it all becomes something Jack never saw coming. The chase for the story - from the underbelly of LA to the rough and tumble of Baja California - proves all-consuming and damaging - to him, to everyone around him. Before the day is done, Jack is no longer writing the story, he becomes the story - right up to the point of he himself becoming the missing man.