Missing Person by Sarah Lotz

Description from Amazon:

Missing-linc.com comprises a group of misfit sleuths scattered across the States. Their macabre passion is giving names to the unidentified dead. When Ellie Caine starts investigating the corpse known as the Boy in the Dress, the Boy’s killer decides to join the group. The closer they get to the truth, the closer he will get to them.

The Boy was Teddy Ryan. He was meant to have been killed in a car crash in the west of Ireland in 1989. Only he wasn’t. There is no grave in Galway and Teddy was writing letters from New York a year after he supposedly died. But one night he met a man in a Minnesota bar and vanished off the face of the earth.

Teddy’s nephew, Shaun, is no hero, but he is determined to solve the thirty-year-old mystery. He joins forces with the disparate members of Missing-linc to hunt down the killer. The only problem: the killer will be with them every step of the way . . .

 

It sounds like a fabulous idea, right? A decade’s-old mystery suddenly getting a new lead, with the possibility of the mystery being solved. But there is just something missing to tie it all together.

You are introduced to the members of Missing-linc, all of whom have usernames without actually knowing each other in real life. And of course, each person in real life has their own issues. Early on we know that the killer is one of them and it becomes a race to see whether they can solve the case and unmask the killer, or whether the person will use the clues to try to lead them astray, or indeed get rid of one of them or Shaun, who has come over from Ireland.

Little red herrings are thrown into the mix to make the public want revenge for the killing and then finding out that the victim might not be who everyone thinks he is. So each page is a bit more of a is he / isn’t he and will they figure it out.

There are plenty of odd characters, from ordinary next-door neighbours to outright “ijits”, and in my book if you kick a dog, you on my list of evildoers!

There is a big clue as to how the book will end – if you read into it carefully. But by the time it ends it feels rushed and like it wasn’t properly finished off. Most of the characters’ issues are dealt with throughout the book, so at least it’s not just a book based on one plotline alone.

The idea behind amateur sleuths solving crimes that the police can’t is not new but this is an interesting take on it. The story needed more to finish it off (round it off) and insert the characters more to the point where I believed their individual stories. Unfortunately, just average for me. A long haul for an ending that petered out...