Missing Persons: A Memoir comes from one who becomes the last in her family after she loses her aunt and then her mother, facing the rigors of caring for a dying person at home and the ongoing feelings of loss that comes from their recent deaths and the prior demise of her younger brother and her father. 

Gayle Greene was forced to confront basic questions of her values and journey in life as she lived through her mother and aunt's final days and a year's aftermath of being without them and without family ties. 

The result is a hard-hitting account of one woman's adjustments and survival tactics that takes into account the broader issues of death, dying, and family heritage. Missing Persons is recommended for anyone who enjoys memoirs about family connections, loss, and disconnections. 

Do you like your writer's reference books to be written by someone with wit and sass? Bonus points for having Oprah's imprimatur? Then Fay Faron is your woman. 

A fun book about a subject I never knew I needed to know about. Fun BECAUSE of the writing style.

-cg

“The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.”― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

Rowan Is Brilliant. Brilliant on a level that Einstein didn’t approach, but Da Vinci may have shared. That kind of brilliance makes it hard enough to bond with ‘normals’ under the best of circumstances. Add in parents who saw her as an interesting experiment, homeschooling her and discouraging any outside hobbies, interest, or friends, and living a normal life is pretty much an impossibility of stunning proportions. But, when Rowan meets Lexi in college, her life changes. Lexi teaches her ‘social studies.’ How to talk to people. How to smile. How to have fun. How to be human.

But then, Lexi disappeared. And Rowen’s life was shattered. The pieces that Lexi had nurtured fell away, leaving the cold, precise, analytical Rowen behind. It hurts to be so broken. So, she analyzes. She analyzes at work, putting together business strategies for the customers of Hologram Security. She analyzes everything, researching, investigating, plotting and graphing everything that strikes her fancy. But especially missing persons, and Lexi’s disappearance. She even researches dating strategies when her friend, Farrah Lewis, whom she met in a support group for friends and family members of missing persons, asks. For six long years, ever since the day Lexi disappeared, Rowan has functioned like an analytical droid, living for her work, for her analysis. For the faint hope that one day she will find the thread that will bring Lexi back to her. Rowan is The Bloodhound, sniffing out facts and presenting them to her clients in the form of cold logic. Just as coldly logical as her life is lived.

And then one day, Harrison Briggs appears in her office. And all the pain comes rushing back. For Harrison Briggs is Lexi’s boyfriend. Was the last person to see her alive on that terrible day, when Lexi disappeared, and Rowan’s whole life imploded. Harrison Briggs, who has the gall to stand in front of her and swear that he didn’t attend Columbia. That he has never heard of Lexi. What kind of monster can do that? To stand in front of her and deny his relationship with the one person Rowan loved above all others? How Could He?

But things are even stranger than she thought. And what is true may very well cost Rowan her life.

I adored Rowan and her story. Mystery. Suspense. Convolutions. This a very well written, enjoyable book that kept me reading for way too long into the night. She is brilliant, but in such pain. Watching what has become of her psyche due to her parents cold scientific parenting is heartbreaking, and her ability to grow and change through the book gave me heart. Her search for her friend, and the pain of all family and friends of missing persons, is extremely well written. Highly recommended.

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for a realistic review. This is Randa Flannery’s first book and I will be watching closely for her next.

“Lost. Murdered. Dumped. Unclaimed. This country’s overflowing with the forgotten dead. And somewhere someone’s wondering about each and every one of those souls.” -- Hazel “Lucky” Strike, Websleuth, Speaking in Bones, Kathy Reichs

UIDs. That is what they are called in the US. Unidentified Remains. The remains of a human being, a collection of bones, sometimes a whole skeleton, sometimes only bits and pieces. They collect in storage rooms, stuffed into cardboard boxes, lonely and forgotten. They are planted in pauper’s graves, sometimes cremated, sometimes misidentified as deer or bear bones and left where they lie. That is, if they are found at all.

Overburdened and underfunded police and labs can’t prioritize them, and even when they try, the forms utilized by the FBI are, literally, 30-pages long. Not something a police officer asks family members to  work through when reporting a missing person, so even if remains are found, finding the right name is a shot in the dark by a blind, drunken shooter. It simply doesn’t happen. Something had to be done – and Speaking In Bones tells the tale of what normal, everyday people are willing to do to find the links – to identify UIDs and return them to where they belong.

The woman sitting in Temperance Brennan's office chair plays a horrifying soundtrack. Two male voices, one female. And the female is begging, literally, for the torture to stop.

“Please don’t kill me.

“Please don’t kill me.

“Please.

“Kill me.”

Hazel “Lucky” Strike is an odd, and possibly dangerous, new being to Tempe. A “Websleuth”, one of a growing group of everyday people who spend their time and efforts researching missing persons and unidentified remains, attempting to find a match, to bring the remains home. Simplistically, they match bodies to people ‘gone missing’. And while Tempe immediately jumps in with “That is the task of law enforcement in conjunction with coroners and medical examiners” she soon must admit that the situation truly isn’t handled by any of the above. Not really. Even though NCIC (National Criminal Information Center) recently NCIC MP and UID Data, eighty percent of coroners and MEs rarely or never even try to match MPs and UIDs. The bones simply go in a box and get stuck on a shelf, forgotten once again. And while Tempe comes across quite sanctimonious and holier-than-thou at first, she soon is intrigued by Lucky's idea. The woman thinks she has identified a UID. A UID Tempe has in a box on her own shelf. Digging further, Tempe gets another shock. At any one time, there are 90,000 missing persons in the United States. In the past fifty years, the cases of unidentified remains, most never identified at all, runs upwards of 40,000. Forty thousand human beings whose families will never know what happened to their loved ones.

Tempe can’t resist a mystery, and this one crawls in and settles under her skin. And what happens becomes a horrifying story of obsession, zealotry, and twisted murder that had me alternately reading compulsively and hitting the web to research websleuthing and the people who spend their time and money trying to bring the lost home.

Reichs does her normal outstanding job of not only brilliant research, but bringing her writing to life, giving it personality and a life of its own. The story is gripping, her characters compelling, and her grasp of the issues ‘behind the scenes’ kept me reading well past ‘dumb o’clock’. She layers the reality of websleuthing with a shocking modern day tale of religion, obsession, murder, psychology and bigotry that left me sitting here well after I had finished the book, shocked into meditative silence as I tried to absorb all that I read.

There is, of course, the issue of her relationship with Andrew Ryan, lieutenant-detective, Service des enquêtes sur les crimes contre la personne, Sûreté du Québec. In other words, a Detective Lieutenant with the Quebec Provincial Police and Tempe's on-again-off-again lover and general pain in the backside. Things are just as volatile, and frustrating, there as they always have been. Enough said, other than to say that the roller coaster seems to be on the upswing now. Whether that will last is another question.

This book bounded to my “Top Five Reads of 2015” with a bullet with shocking ease. I encourage you to read it – it truly is the best of Reichs books that I can remember reading. It isn’t perfect, but it is perfectly stunning.

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for a realistic review. All thoughts are my own.

PUBLISHING JULY 21, 2015

For further information on Websleuthing, MPs and UDIs, here are a few sites. One thing that is pointed out in the book, and was further noted during my own research, is that people are people. There are some whacko, vitriolic head cases out there posting on the sites. There are, however, many more people who are honest, caring, normal human beings who simply want to help.

“It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time.” -- ― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

The following are only a few of the sites Ms. Reichs recommends in her book.

http://namus.gov/
http://untfsu.com/
http://www.doenetwork.org/
http://www.websleuths.com/