Reviewed by Wendy Lipke
Fleur McDonald’s latest book, The Missing, took me a little while to get to know the key players and how they would fit together in the story. In the Prologue we meet a group of teenagers, in an isolated town, who get together in an old building out of town, sharing alcohol, drugs and ghost stories. While the majority head back to town one of their number walks off into the night in the opposite direction.
The reader then finds themselves two weeks before this incident where they learn a little more about those they have already met. Also, the reader is introduced to several other characters. There are two newcomers to town, a woman detective and a female radio talkback host. Another detective finds himself with a different focus at work and then there is the loner, Smurf, trying to live with his past war experiences, out on a station, well away from the town. The reader knows in their heart that all these seemingly separate scenarios will all come together in a neat bundle to solve the mystery at the end.
As with many of this author’s stories the location plays a very important role in the storyline. Kalgoolie, as many readers will know, is a gold-mining town on the fringe of the Nullarbor Plain and the Victoria Desert where red dirt is king. As a gold mining town, it has its own unique problems, and it is very isolated. This is a tourist town with people coming and going especially during the horse-racing season where thousands of dollars could change hands in an afternoon. People either love it or hate it.
Not all the key characters seem to be working together. The female detective and the radio host seem to have no common ground on first meeting, but they are both concerned with a missing boy. However, they are not the same boy. There is a current missing teenager and there was also another boy who went missing – a fostered teenager, about a year ago, and it appears to the journalist that this case has just been swept away.
Appropriately this is National Missing Person’s Week, so anyone who hasn’t been seen for some time becomes the centre of attention especially for the radio host. She comes across as very assertive which is not appreciated in this town. When she tried her forthrightness at the police station she was promptly told, ‘I’m guessing you’re new from the city. Here’s a heads-up. Bullying tactics don’t work out here.’ (81)
The two women are also here, in this isolated place, for their own reasons, and their past keeps surfacing as they go about their new life. The female detective feels that with all the personal issues that are going on in her life as she settles into this town, her life was a circus, and she was the clown (202). Not all the residents in town are as they appear either, and all these situations add more depth and humanity to the story.
But the central theme is the missing boys and when a teenage girl also seems to disappear thoughts of abduction spur the police into action.
Fleur McDonald is a very prolific Australian writer producing two novels a year. She often features the detective Dave Burrows in her stories. It is mentioned that for those who read her novel, The Prospect, and were left with unanswered answers, they will find their answers in this latest novel.
The Missing
(2025)
by Fleur McDonald
Harper Collins
ISBN: 978-1-6607-6690-3
$34.99; 352pp