Missing Joseph

Missing Joseph by Elizabeth George

It’s to the author’s credit that by that by the end of the book I came to care about characters so much that I found myself wondering how their lives will play out after we’ve closed the pages of the book. I found myself dissatisfied with the future that seems to await Maggie Spence, the thirteen year old whose mother has been taken away for murder and kidnapping. While Lynley has visited the home of her birth mother Sheelah in London and has determined that despite the poverty and array of half siblings from different fathers, Sheelah genuinely does love her children, a close reading reveals some troubling factors in Maggie’s the
new environment. During Lynley’s visit, Sheelah’s oldest boy warns her about her latest fiancée. Sheelah points to her pregnant belly and explains that the baby will need a father. It indicates that contrary to Lynley’s opinion, she has not matured very much since she first exposed Maggie, who was an infant, to a violent father who fractured her skull and some ribs. I was hoping that Maggie’s boyfriend Nick’s family would somehow become involved in her guardianship, which in some way would parallel the history of Simon and Deborah. Nick was a character whom one takes an initial dislike to and distrust of in the manner in which he is introduced into the story, only to find that he and his family turn out to be genuinely decent people. It is a strength of the author to be able to create such vividly drawn characters that I,as a reader, am speculating over their fates as if they were real.