Is there anything more devastating than the loss a loved one? Perhaps the uncertainty of the loss of a loved one is worse; the terrible not knowing what has happened, and being plagued by a multitude of awful imaginings. I think of the psychological torture the characters in Tim Krabbe's The Golden Egg (also made into the haunting film The Vanishing) or William Gay's short story The Paperhanger or Friedrich Durrenmatt's The Pledge, (again a good film with the same name directed by Sean Penn and Starring Jack Nicholson) suffered and pray I never know it from the inside.

Shelby Waters knows first hand what it's like. Years after the disappearance of her sister Darly she has started the Rescue Effort Volunteers, (REV) and taken on the responsibility of searching for the missing and helping the loved ones of those gone to live again. When a young woman named Katy Connor goes missing, Shelby is called upon to help put together what's happened. You Believers by Jane Bradley is, in Shelby's words, "Katy's story. At least I think it's Katy's story. It's hard to say sometimes where one woman's story ends and another begins," and it features just about the most devastating opening paragraph I've ever read. Warning: if you pick it up and sample that opening, you, like me, won't be able to stop. 

And while it's not what I'd call a feel-good story, a neat and tidy mystery or even a pulse-pounding thriller, it packs more feeling, mystery and pulse raising to potential coronary levels than you have any reasonable right to expect from one book. Sure, it's emotionally loaded material that any hack can exploit for instant intensity, (and in the hands of a lesser writer that's exactly what you'd have here), but Bradley has gone far beyond the broad side of barns and nailed her target so precisely, (with character, with empathy and the space to soak it in) I hope never to be caught in her crosshairs. Let me be clear here too - You Believers is not an endless bummer of a novel. The warmth and human kinship found in the pages would bring me around for seconds in a heartbeat. 

"I'm trying to tell you the story, but to give you the story would be like giving you the churning blue sea one bucket at a time. You might taste the salt, feel the cold, but the weight and wave of so much water, well, it's lost."

Gonna have to catch up on Bradley's earlier work quick-like... Oooh look, she's got a short story collection! Go away and don't bother me for a while, I'm going to be reading Are We Lucky Yet?

Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.