The Sunday Times review by Stephen Amidon

Sam Simoneaux, the amiable Cajun hero of Tim Gautreaux’s powerful third novel, bears a nickname that appears singularly inappropriate — “Lucky”. Graciously given to him by a little French girl whose finger he accidentally severs as he clears mines from a first-world-war battlefield, it refers to the fact that Sam’s regiment arrived in Europe on Armistice day. What the child does not know is that up until this point Sam’s luck has been mostly of the rotten variety: when he was an infant in Louisiana, his family was slaughtered by a marauding gang, while Sam’s own little boy died of a fever just before he set off for war.

His ill fortune continues on his return home. Though he lands a good job as a shopwalker in a posh New Orleans department store, he loses it when he allows three-year-old Lily Weller to be kidnapped from under his nose. Overcome by guilt, he takes a job on the Mississippi steamboat where Lily’s parents work as entertainers, determined to search for her kidnappers, who may have begun coveting the girl when she performed with her family.

His quest leads him to the Skadlocks, a clan of backwoods knuckle-draggers who snatched Lily on behalf of wealthy clients. By the time Sam has tracked the little girl down, the Wellers have suffered serious ill fortune of their own, forcing him into a dilemma: would it be better to leave Lily with her affluent, doting new parents, or return her to a life of certain hardship and poverty?

The quandary is characteristic of a novel whose narrative is built as much on moral stress as on gunfights and wilderness adventure. In the course of Sam’s search, he stumbles on a clue about the slaughter of his own family — it appears to have been carried out by the Cloats, a clan that could have been evicted from a Cormac McCarthy novel for being too primitive and violent. This knowledge again impales Sam on the horns of a dilemma — should he seek revenge for a crime more than two decades old, or accept his uncle’s dictum that “what people do wrong is its own punishment”?

Gautreaux has skilfully furni-shed his moral fable with all the accoutrements of life on the Mississippi circa 1921. The boat on which Sam works is a sort of floating bandstand, where poor farmers and millworkers can forget their hardscrabble lives with a few hours of dancing to a band whose black members they might have lynched in other circumstances. Almost inevitably, these short, alcohol-fuelled cruises descend into riots. “You know, these ain’t bad people,” one of Sam’s colleagues muses. “They’re just uneducated, unsophisticated, untravelled, immoral, and uncivilised. Plus stupid.”

But they cannot hold a candle to Gautreaux’s villains. The Skadlocks own a dog named Satan and mark their matriarch’s grave with the skillet she cooked with for five decades. The Cloats are worse — their standard of living seems to offend even their livestock. When asked what has become of missing members of the clan, an Indian woman they have enslaved answers succinctly: “Die, rot. Some rot, then die.”

The best thing about The Missing, however, is its hero. Sam is a memorable creation, a man singularly alive to life’s frailty. He is cursed with the ability to hear the anguished call of the missing. In France, as he surveys a horrific battlefield he has been asked to clear, he envisions the legions of dead, and understands how they have become “pieces cut forever out of the lives of their families”. Even the brutish Cloats are afforded their share of humanity. “They’re exactly like you and I,” Sam is taught by a wise sheriff he befriends. “They’re just fallen a few more rungs down the moral ladder than most.”

Gautreaux could have easily turned Sam into an ennobled aven-ger who smites the benighted and rescues the innocent as he negotiates this hazardous terrain. Instead, his hero never loses sight of the fact that the best of intentions can lead to the worst of results, and that every person must carry the heavy weight of his own soul. This, in the end, is Sam’s good luck — the ability to hold onto his compassion when everyone around him seems desperate to jettison theirs. It is a quality shared by this remarkable novel’s author, who has pulled off the rare feat of investing a rip-roaring adventure novel with a true depth of feeling.

The Missing by Tim Gautreaux

Sceptre £17.99 pp384