The monsters we make

A community is shaken by a local paperboy's disappearance--the second in two years. Crystal Cox, an ambitious high-school senior, is soon obsessed with the case, partly out of sisterly concern and partly because cracking the story could help enable her to escape from her small Iowa town. Crystal's efforts and the secrets weighing on her brother, Sammy, are interwoven with the investigation by one of the police officers, who also has his own mixed motivations. A frustratingly obvious red herring and the character of Officer Goodkind, who never rises above every "taking it personally" police-procedural cliché, get in the way of the narrative, but when the book's focus moves away from the whodunit aspect and more on exploring how we cope once we learn people do terrible things, it is very, very good. An air of menace laced with melancholy hangs over every page, a mourning for a more innocent time that perhaps never was real. The monsters were always there; we just couldn't see them.

At the start of this gripping novel from White (The Good Divide as Kali VanBaale), 13-year-old Christopher Stewart vanishes while on his early morning paper route in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1984. The aftermath of his kidnapping unfolds through the perspectives of 12-year-old paperboy Sammy Cox, who has a weighty secret; his 18-year-old sister, Crystal, an aspiring journalist who writes an essay about Christopher's disappearance; and Sgt. Dale Goodkind, of the Crimes Against Persons Section of the Des Moines PD. Two years earlier, Dale worked on the still unsolved case of another missing paperboy. The experience has left him clinically depressed, a condition he hides from his colleagues. His assignment to the Stewart case puts even more strain on his fragile mental health. His unraveling engages just as much as the search for clues. Dale, Crystal, and Sammy each evolves and becomes more self-aware as White skillfully keeps readers questioning everyone's motives. Fans of character-driven crime fiction will be satisfied. Agent: Julia Kenny, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary. (June)