Missing by Sam Hawken / Reviewed by Kimn Hinkson
Killer Nashville Book of the Day
Sam Hawken’s Missing takes readers to the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Widowed but hardboiled Jack Searle resides with his two stepdaughters in Texas, where he’s a workingman who enjoys a beer when the sun goes down.
Despite a strict routine, he retains a curious and sympathetic approach to human nature. That is until his two daughters go missing during a concert while visiting their family in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and Jack is faced with the truly cruel and avaricious side of human nature.
A dramatic and vicious novel, Hawken’s sense of objectivity gives the book the winning cold-cut edge of a revenge-thriller.
Jack Searle is a father-knows-best kind of man who doesn’t cast the bad or the ugly a second glance. Serrated with expressive dynamo, Hawken is climactic in his writing and hardly shies away from the gruesome reality of Nuevo Laredo’s darker sides. Hawken’s vision of an underground Mexico sustained by drugs and heat, and like his last two novels set on the Mexican-U.S. border, this novel prompts attention to the crime and violence that takes place on a global platform.
While hinting unforgivably that catastrophe could be a family-visit away, Hawken’s work is nonetheless a feat in storytelling, and endeavors to strike at the reader’s most tender fears.
Gritty.
Kimn Hinkson is like most over-caffeinated, introverted bibliophiles: indifferent to most other items on the planet. Finding that works of literature, opposed to human beings, lend their gifts absolutely free to those who brave the page, she has procured a sense of forbearance via reading in order to survive this otherwise impoverished existence. Other readers are already familiar with the pretty words they give to the most adverse, uncongenial characters. Somewhere between an insurrectionist and a mereological nihilist, Kimn is one of them.
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