A Map of Small Disappearances

Seven missed calls bring Nell Stride back to Hollow Point, a salt-bitten town at the edge of the map where the spruce trees bend inland and the harbor lights flicker on against a bruised sky. She has not set foot here in years, and the family she left behind has been quietly dismantling itself in her absence: her sister Margot is stretched thin between duty and dread, her brother Owen has stopped answering to his own name, and their mother Vivienne presides over the family's decline with a composure that might be dignity or might be denial. The town has its own catalogue of losses, Henry Otter, who stopped coming to the diner; Lorna Peck, whose shop sign still swings above an empty room; Hattie Pells, who walked out one autumn and never walked back. Most are forgotten. None, Nell begins to suspect, were accidents. When a woman disappears in circumstances the police are content to call ordinary, Nell starts mapping the small vanishances that came before, schoolyard grudges, an old drowning no one investigated, a will that rewrote itself in suspicious ink. Felix Ryce, the journalist who once courted Margot, offers what help he can. Diana Belmore, who knows every doorway in town, watches from her window and says nothing. And Tom Belmore, returning at the same moment from a very different exile, sees in Nell's questions the chance to settle a score of his own. Each thread Nell pulls tightens around someone she loves. Each secret Hollow Point surrenders demands a confession in return. To find the woman gone missing, Nell must first account for everyone who vanished before her, and decide what her own family is still willing to lose.