The Missing Family is the latest in British author Tim Weaver’s popular series of thrillers featuring missing-persons investigator David Raker. Here, Weaver presents an impossible crime, the unexpected tentacles of which stretch clear across the Atlantic and the North American continent.
Sarah Fowler hires Raker to solve the mysterious disappearance of her family a year earlier. After a day at a favourite Dartmoor lake, her husband, teenage son and his girlfriend row the family’s 20-foot dinghy out onto the water one last time. Drowsy from the sun, Sarah briefly falls asleep – her wristwatch confirms she napped for no more than a minute or two – until her toddler, Mable, awakens her. Halfway across the lake, the dinghy bobs, empty. The police are baffled. The boat’s too far out for the trio to have swum to shore in the available time, not to mention the girlfriend’s arm was in a cast. They find no evidence of violence and have no witnesses.
You don’t stay with the grieving Sarah long, though. In Los Angeles, detectives from two different departments – eventually three jurisdictions – are baffled by a trio of shooting episodes. Five bodies, killed by bullets typically used in hunting rifles, are found in remote areas. Far apart, there’s nothing to link them, and they linger for years as separate cold cases.
In yet a third plotline, a massive London-area casino resort, the Skyline, is the setting for the vicious stabbing death of a high-rolling gambler and casino investor. He and the two brothers who own the casino have been best friends for years. Despite the owners’ determination to find the murderer, security camera footage of the victim in the frequent company of another man is notably – possibly suspiciously – uninformative. Who was this stranger?
The brothers also own the world’s largest casino, The Afrique, in Las Vegas. (Coincidentally, I was at a conference in Las Vegas while reading this, which was almost too much verisimilitude!) Weaver certainly captures the over-the-top, mildly uneasy, anything-can-happen casino buzz.
One of Raker’s former police colleagues, Melanie Craw, is now head of security for the Skyline and asks for his help. It turns out that the suspected murderer did return to the Skyline, was identified using facial recognition technology, detained, and put in one of the casino’s secure holding cells under guard. When the police arrived to arrest him, the locked cell was empty. It’s another missing person case, which cries out for Raker’s skills.
Though intrigued, Raker’s full up with the Fowler family disappearance and brings in another former colleague, notoriously short-tempered Colm Healy, whose interpersonal skills deteriorated significantly after the brutal murder of his daughter, Leanna. He lost his position on the force and now works as a low-level security guard. He’s eager to help Raker investigate events at the casino, though Raker remains uneasy about fully trusting him not to explode. And Healy also has an attention issue: he’s desperately trying to repair the bridges he burned with his now-adult sons. A happy ending to that sad story is far from guaranteed.
Having Raker’s two investigations – the missing family and the casino murder – working in tandem, not to mention the West Coast murders, which you learn about through the eyes of the California detectives, means a lot is going on. You may suspect that all three plot lines will eventually weave together, but how?
Though the plot is complex, Weaver’s chapters are short and keep things moving. Sometimes he tries a little too hard to end each chapter with a startling revelation, just before the next chapter switches to another plot. That said, you’ll encounter quite a few nifty surprises, which keep the pages flying.
Raker is hard-pressed to make progress on the missing Fowler family. His instincts say that Sarah Fowler has been candid about the events of that fateful day, but evidence keeps surfacing that casts doubt on her credibility. Perhaps the strongest factor in her favour is how hard she works to create a loving and supportive home environment for her young daughter, Mable, who, after all, has lost her father, her much-loved big brother and his adored girlfriend.
The book is written in both first person (the Raker chapters) and third-person (all the others), which effectively provides first-person immediacy from the lead detective, plus the differing points of view and voices of other characters. It’s never confusing. Overall, a perfect summertime read.
Other popular books in the Raker series reviewed here: The Blackbird, The Last Goodbye, and an early one, What Remains.
Penguin
Print/Kindle/iBook
£8.00
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
