The Missing (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

"[A] wry, sympathetic look at the human heart. . . . It is Gautreaux's masterpiece, his most powerful novel to date." -- The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

"A thrilling page-turner that crisscrosses the Deep South, Tim Gautreaux's The Missing is a look at lives that are steeped in loss, and an examination of what it is that we can recover." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Absorbing. . . . A primal story about the meaning of loss, the pull of revenge, and the necessity of healing." --The Boston Globe

"If you've been complaining that nobody writes novels as they used to, this could be your book. . . . Fantastic." --The Washington Post Book World

"Gautreaux has a mythic sense of plot, a keen ear for dialect and vivid powers of description. . . . [He] is an old-fashioned storyteller, a spinner of yarns with a moral." --The New York Times Book Review

"Jazz flows through The Missing like another river. . . . A grand story with unconventional heft." --The Miami Herald

"Remarkable. . . . Mr. Gautreaux has given us a compelling adventure tale with a moral center." --The Wall Street Journal

"Evocative. . . . Few novels this year will hold so much story, craft and song." --Winston-Salem Journal

"Gautreaux's language is as rich as the land he writes about, and he conveys a sense of the wild new jazz music as well as the ageless swamp." --Boston Phoenix

"The seamless structuring of the classic and the contemporary, of the past and the present, is the mesmerizing magic of The Missing. . . . Exquisite." --The Anniston Star

"[Gautreaux's] writing is a masterful mix--beautifully lyrical, yet incredibly authentic. . . . Gautreaux transports readers to a place and time populated by characters who are fully formed, deftly drawn and--for the most part--quite a scary bunch." --The Beachcomber

"[Gautreaux's] depiction of the hardscrabble, base lives of the vile people in the country is the best writing about that class of people since Charles Frazier described a similar clan in Cold Mountain." --Baton Rouge Advocate

"Beautifully detailed. . . . Sentence by sentence, [Gautreaux's] prose is as accomplished as anything I've read in the past couple of years." --Doug Childers, Richmond Times-Dispatch

"An epic triumph. . . . [The Missing] has the impact of a book twice its length. It's a dramatic, theatrical meditation on law and lawlessness, guilt and the hollowness of vengeance. . . . The anticipation clutching your throat makes you race towards the novel's climax." -The Guardian (UK)

By the author of THE CLEARING ('the finest American novel I've read in a long, long time' - Annie Proulx), an enthralling tale of abduction, guilt and redemption set in Jazz Age Louisiana