It’s ironic that the leader of the task force assigned to investigate the disappearance of Jennifer Griffin keeps reminding the key detectives on the team not to get tunnel vision on this case. They nod and then carry right on, bending every bit of evidence to fit their preconceptions.
Jennifer vanished one night after attending her book club meeting, located about a ten-minute drive from her and Greg’s home. She would normally have been home shortly after 10:30, so Greg wasn’t expecting her to be there when he got back from his construction site and a bar visit with his crew about an hour earlier.
Greg woke up in the middle of the night and–panicking–set out to look for her. He phoned the woman who hosted the club that night and then retraced the route, several times, in case of an accident.
The answers to this mystery are lost in family history
Along the way he hit an unflagged traffic cone and scraped his hands, as well as getting a bit dirty, getting it unstuck from under his truck. Some four hours later he called 911 and reported Jen missing.
From the very first police interview, those hands shape the official reaction, in line with the assumption that domestic violence is usually the husband’s fault. Lacking any solid evidence, the detectives carry on as if Greg is the obvious answer to every question: confiscate all the home’s devices; search the home; make it clear that all their actions are “simple matters of routine” and if he should object to anything it would be a sign of guilt.
Their investigation goes so far as interviewing 8-year-old Jake and accepting all his misunderstandings and panicky statements as absolute evidence.
It’s several chapters before we learn that Jen has been taken to an unknown place by an unknown person, for reasons that he indicates will eventually become clear to her “when she is ready”.
This basic story is only one of several things going on in this book, and not all of them are connected. There are the actions of the creepy TV repairman who seems to have been casing homes and doing suggestive things around the women who live in them.
There’s the case of the high-flying school board trustee who sees himself as God’s gift to all women, and whom Greg’s sister thinks has been coming onto Jen.
Jen has met both of these men, and has issues with one of them, but the actual answer to her abduction is buried in a troubled family history that she has tried hard to forget.
We spend lots of time in Greg’s feverish mind, agonizing over her absence, but also feeling guilty over the dalliance he had been tempted to have with an attractive business associate. During the last couple of months, Jen had been increasingly depressed and distant, and Brooke had been a distraction for him; a temptation he had pondered, but not acted on.
More than a month later, there is a hit and run accident in a nearby city and there’s a mangled body that appears to be Jen’s. Then there is a funeral. In all this time there has been nothing definitive to pin on Greg, but the suspicion continues.
We know better. We keep having visits to the unknown place where she is a prisoner, but there’s a lot left to unwrap before we finally get to know just what is going on. There are many surprises before the final revelations, but the ending is satisfactory.
Rick Mofina, who lives in Ottawa, is a USA Today bestselling author of more than thirty crime fiction thrillers that have been published in nearly thirty countries. A former journalist, he has interviewed murderers on death row, flown over Los Angeles with the LAPD, and patrolled with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police near the Arctic. He has also reported from the Caribbean, Africa, Kuwait, and Qatar
He is a two-time winner of the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence (the Ellis Award), a Barry Award winner, and a multiple finalist for the International Thriller Writers Thriller Award and the Shamus Award, presented by the Private Eye Writers of America. Library Journal calls him “one of the best thriller writers in the business.”
