Missing

Praise for Sam Hawken:

"Hawken's understated but razor-sharp prose never gets in the way of the building tension. . . . Powerful stuff."—Booklist

Jack Searle is an American widower, bringing up his stepdaughters alone in the border town of Laredo after losing his wife to cancer.

Jack often takes the girls to visit their Mexican family over the border in Nuevo Laredo. Marina, the elder sister, persuades him to let her go there one night to attend a concert with her cousin Patricia. Jack wants to say no—Nuevo Laredo is a very dangerous city, controlled by drug cartels. But eventually he agrees. Marina and Patricia head out to the concert, but they never come back . . .

A frantic hunt begins, with Jack leading the way. But this is Nuevo Laredo, and girls go missing all the time here. He's lucky to find that a good cop, Gonzalo Soler, is leading their investigation, but soon the whole police force is suspended due to endemic corruption.

To have any chance of finding Marina and Patricia, Jack and Gonzalo must take the law into their own hands. Their efforts to find the girls become more and more dangerous, and they uncover truths about the city of Nuevo Laredo that neither one of them ever wanted to face.

Sam Hawken lives near Washington, DC, with his wife and son. His previous novels, Tequila Sunset and The Dead Women of Juarez, were both nominated for Dagger awards.