Missing
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Jack Searle is an American widower, bringing up his two stepdaughters Lidia and Marina alone in the border town of Laredo after losing his wife to cancer.
Jack often takes the girls to visit their Mexican family over the border in Nuevo Laredo. Marina, the elder sister, persuades him to let her go there without him one night, to attend a concert with her cousin Patricia. Jack wants to say no - Nuevo Laredo is a very dangerous city, controlled by drug cartels and devastated by violence and corruption. But eventually he agrees - she's growing up and he has to let her have some independence.
Marina and Patricia head out to the concert, but they never come back.
A frantic hunt for them begins, with Jack leading the way. But this is Nuevo Laredo, and girls go missing all the time here. They're lucky to find that a good cop - Gonzalo Soler - is leading their investigation, but soon the whole police force is suspended due to endemic corruption. The army take over the city, and finding the missing girls is not their priority.
To survive this nightmare and have any chance of finding Marina and Patricia, Jack and Gonzalo must take the law into their own hands. Their efforts to find the girls become more and more dangerous, and they uncover truths about the city of Nuevo Laredo that neither one of them ever wanted to face.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This uninspired crime novel from Hawken (Tequila Sunset) hits the right notes but falls short of the standard set by his earlier books, all of which take place along the Texas-Mexico border. Jack Searle, a middle-aged widower, does his best to raise his two half-Mexican teenage daughters on what small-time contracting and handyman gigs he can get around Laredo, Tex. He s careful to maintain his daughters connection to their Mexican side of the family and makes regular visits with them across the border. When his older daughter, Marina, disappears with her cousin at a concert in Nuevo Laredo, Searle finds himself drawn into the city s complex and violent underbelly. As the weeks pass with no word from the ineffectual local police, an increasingly desperate Searle decides to take matters into his own hands. While Hawken knows the border country well and writes convincingly about its sociopolitical aspects, stock characters and situations give this effort a paint-by-the-numbers feel.
