The loss of innocents

Here are two novels about that most harrowing and haunting of subjects — children who go missing.

Here are two novels about that most harrowing and haunting of subjects — children who go missing. Rachel Billington’s Missing Boy is Dan, a 13-year- old runaway. Dan’s disappearance marks the beginning of a nightmare for his parents, Eve and Max, plus aunt Martha. Has Dan run away or has he been kidnapped? Will he be found? The if, where and how are the questions that torment them. As Ronnie, the police liaison officer puts it, though families vary, when there’s a missing child the suffering is always the same, a pattern of ‘disbelief, anger, terror, despair, endurance.’

On her website Billington describes the structure of The Missing Boy as ‘a kind of thriller with the boy’s safety under constant threat’ and it’s this that gives the novel its suspense. We follow Dan on a dangerous journey that has him sleeping rough, encountering an ex-prisoner (shades of the Pip/Magwitch encounter of Great Expectations), living in a squat and getting involved with latter-day hippies, travellers and drug dealers.