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    The Missing: A Novel
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    The Missing: A Novel
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    The Missing: A Novel
    Ebook430 pages5 hours

    The Missing: A Novel

    By C.L. Taylor

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In this harrowing psychological thriller about a missing teenage boy whose mother must expose the secrets within their own family if she wants to find her son—perfect for fans of Reconstructing Amelia.

    You love your family. They make you feel safe. You trust them. Or do you…?

    When fifteen-year-old Billy Wilkinson goes missing in the middle of the night, his mother, Claire Wilkinson, blames herself. She’s not the only one. There isn’t a single member of Billy’s family that doesn’t feel guilty. But the Wilkinsons are so used to keeping secrets from one another that it isn’t until six months later, after an appeal for information goes horribly wrong, that the truth begins to surface.

    Claire is sure of two things—that Billy is still alive and that her friends and family had nothing to do with his disappearance.

    A mother’s instinct is never wrong. Or is it…?

    Combining an unreliable narrator and fast-paced storytelling, The Missing is a chilling novel of psychological suspense that will thoroughly captivate and obsess readers.

    “The Missing has a delicious sense of foreboding from the first page, luring us into the heart of a family with terrible secrets and making us wait, with pounding hearts for the final, agonizing twist. Loved it.”—Fiona Barton, author of The Widow



     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateNov 7, 2017
    ISBN9780062673541
    Unavailable
    The Missing: A Novel
    Author

    C.L. Taylor

    C.L. Taylor is a Sunday Times bestselling author. Her psychological thrillers have sold over a million copies in the UK alone, been translated into over twenty languages, and optioned for television. Her 2019 novel, Sleep, was a Richard and Judy pick. C.L. Taylor lives in Bristol with her partner and son.

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    Reviews for The Missing

    3.5/5

    88 ratings16 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Pretty darn good for 250 pages, but then it unfortunately limps to the finish line. Not a bad Halloween book, but I liked her first one better.
    • 3/5
      Virus is frightening, creepy, and definitely not to be read at night. The characters and plot are very believable, as are the actions of many of the residents of Corpus Christi. The story itself is easy to read but difficult to put down. With a style reminiscent of early Stephen King, Virus delivers genuine tension and thrills as well as a desire to continue reading. This book is a scary read and highly recommended. Langlan is an author to watch in future. I genuinely believe we will see good things from her.
    • 3/5
      This is a mix between zombie novel and a vampire novel. The infected don't die; instead the virus changes them, altering their physiology to meet its needs. They feed, eating every part of flesh from the bodies (zombie). They also have mind reading abilities and light sensitivity that forces them to sleep during the day (vampire). The mix works fairly well. The story is told from the point of view of multiple characters, those who live in the small town that will become ground zero for the plague. I was fairly impressed at Langan's ability to give each character depth and complexity in each small chapter, though a couple of them who fell into the cookie cutter range. It was a strange thing that as the story progressed, I slowly began to like the characters less and less instead of the other way around. I eventually didn't care much what happened to them.Despite not loving the characters, this was a fast paced novel, an easy, lightweight read, and just what I needed at the moment.I didn't realize that this was the second book in a series when I picked it up. The story just kind of ends and it feels very much like it's still in the middle of things. I enjoyed this enough that I'm curious to go read about the events that are hinted at in the first book. And I'd be interested in following, what happens next, as well.
    • 4/5
      While there are elements of "bits of Stephen King" in the story - small town in Maine, characters with a rough past - I think this book should be more well liked by fans of Guillermo del Toro's The Strain trilogy. The characters are very real, some pitiful, some two-faced, some degenerate, some you end up cheering for when you least expect it. But most of all, I enjoy that there isn't a happy ending. That's horror for you. Someone doesn't always save the world. There's a supernatural element that isn't fully explained, but has it's origins in the ghost town of Bedford. This is where it also feels like Silent Hill. Bedford was abandoned because of a fire and the sulfuric content in the air. But that dark, brooding hate of Bedford resurrects something that possess anything that it comes into contact with. A plague that is mistaken for a virus, attacks the town of Corpus Christi. It spreads quickly and transforms people into something inhuman, grotesque and rotting. The plague is mistakenly identified as a virus, both airborne and transferred by the exchange of bodily fluid but just like in the Strain, it isn't. Although certain points don't get explained, I can accept that because it kept me enthralled. I couldn't put it down and read it in two days, and there were parts that genuinely gave me the chills. But then again, perhaps I should have read "The Keeper" first, and it apparently explains a lot of what happened to the town of Bedford without "The Missing" being a direct sequel.
    • 4/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed this book as much as I enjoyed The Keeper. Now with this book, we were in the town over from Bedford where the last one took place. She so reminds me of Stephen King. This book had everything from exotic descriptions to the horror that I have come to love so much.Things happen so slowly, yet so fast. First of all with the class trip to Bedford, a young boy named James takes it upon himself to get lost and then the voices talk to him. They know what he wants, what he is like. Then he is attacked and killed by animals. The dirt in Bedford is squishy like it's made up of blood. It even smells like it. With Ms. Langan's descriptions, you can practically see everything and everyone in this book. Everyone in the town seems to know that something is coming, but they aren't sure when or where, but they know that it's coming. It's a tale of survival and not letting the madness take over your mind. Even the reader knows something is coming, but not sure when and where it's going to happen.The infection seems to move quickly. People end up getting sick and guess what ... these people are dead and turned into zombies, more or less. Oh, and we all know how I love these kinds of books. The tone of the book is dark, which is why it had it's appeal for me. It's an edge of your seat tale of nail-biting terror.
    • 2/5
      Virus is a short story masquerading as a novel where the plot centres around a virus, of psychological power, or potentially of the realm of the supernatural. Each chapter is a struggle to complete as the myriad of characters meander off-plot almost incessantly, with their histories told usually paragraphs before they expire, which somewhat removes any page-turning qualities. There are striking similarities to her previous book, The Keeper, which unfortunately carried the same issues (and some similar parts of the plot too). Overall, Virus has no likeable characters, at times is hard to follow and ultimately offers little reward for actually getting through it.
    • 2/5
      In The Missing, an industrial accident unleashes a virus that creates zombie-like flesh eaters, feasting on an affluent town in Maine.I picked this up as my annual Halloween read, but it didn't do much for me. The story and characters were interesting enough, in a soap-opera kind of way, but there was way too much grade-school gore, and not nearly enough terror. I like my horror novels to be truly frightening, to follow me around for days (I'm thinking of The Haunting of Hill House, or early Stephen King). This one was just not scary.
    • 3/5
      Sarah Langan sure does like Stephen King. Perhaps she doesn't realize how much he's rolling around in her head, but it seems like she went looking for her voice and found his instead. Her stories read like the kind of dream you would have if you took a King novel to bed and woke up the next morning, with a plot of your own rolling around that you struggle to make sense of. I picked this one up because my library said it was a zombie book, and I had a zombie research project of sorts in the works. It's not really a zombie book. Well, it is in that there is a contagion in the town that appears to turn those affected into flesh-eaters - but it's very unclear how this happens, and generalized evil dreck from the site of a former supernatural tragedy has a large part to play in this. I would argue that Langan is working out her Stephen King issues in a big way here, and that what the people in this town really have is whatever was in the bottom of the mine in King's Desperation. Same symptoms. The changed are crazy and antisocial, but not mindless, and they have the same weird gore/respiratory symptoms as did those touched by Tak. Maybe a little of The Tommyknockers thrown in, and a definite nod to Straub's Eyes of the Dragon - the prologue narrator's husband is like a character straight out of that book.The biggest problem with Langan is that all of her characters seemed to be crazy going in, so it's hard to tell who's been affected, and whether they would have been any better off if they managed to escape. Another of her books, Audrey's Door, which is Langan's version of The Shining/Haunting of Hill House, demonstrated this phenomenon the best. The main character meets a doorman - over the course of a very superficial conversation decides he wants her body, no, wait, he thinks of her as his daughter. She insults his parenting and implies that the daughter he briefly mentions is crazy, then decides he's fatherly and she likes him. What??? In the beginning of Langan's The Keeper, there is a sentence that says, effectively, that the whole town, while obsessing about the crazy main character, had decided their other problems were worse and, AS A GROUP, without speaking to one another about it, decided to stop thinking about/discussing her. Does this seem likely to you? Reading Langan is like watching the Brontes write King. And yet, I think I'm giving the impression here that this book, and Langan's other works, are awful. Literary merit aside, they ARE compelling. It's that dream quality they have, I think. I'd give them a chance. It's like a tale told late at night, by the fireside. Sometimes everything doesn't always have to make sense.
    • 5/5
      The town of Corpus Christi, Maine, is a nice middle-class suburb where life is quiet, until a class field trip disturbs something better left sleeping. Very quickly, a sickness spreads through town - but this is no ordinary virus. It preys on a person's deepest fears and failures, and turns its victims into something very different from human. Sarah Langan has crafted a great story that starts with a set of flawed characters, then ratchets up the horror until the story becomes apocaplyptic. This is one creepy story. It's a sequel to The Keeper, her previous novel, but the stories are only loosely connected. If you want the full effect, read 'em in order, but The Missing certainly stands on its own.
    • 4/5
      Every parent's worst nightmare is for their child to go missing - not knowing if they are still alive plus feeling the guilt that somehow it must have been your fault. This novel shows the pain and guilt that Billy's family was feeling six months after he disappeared. There are secrets and anger and mystery but most important was the pain that the mother was feeling while she was still searching for her son and believing that she was seeing him in crowds. Finding her son consumed all of her thoughts and energy and made the family even more splintered.When 15 year old Billy goes missing from the Wilkinson house in the middle of the night, his parents and older brother are sure that he will turn up the next day. Two days later they get the police involved and six months later there is still no sign of Billy. The dad and brother are sure that Billy is dead but his mom Claire is convinced that he is alive and that when she finds him, he'll come home and everything will be normal with their family again. The question after reading about this family is - were they ever normal? They don't get along and they are all keeping secrets from each other. During different parts of the book, I suspected each member of the family to be the person responsible for Billy's disappearance - even his mom who was having blackouts and ending up places that she had no memory of going to. The end was satisfying and I was totally unprepared for it.This is my first book by C. L. Taylor and I need to order her previous two books. I highly recommend The Missing but make sure you have plenty of time set aside to read it because you won't want to put it down until you get to the end.Thanks to the publisher and TLC Books Tours for a copy of this book to read and review.
    • 2/5
      I really couldn't get into this book. It just aggravated me. I just couldn't care for any of the characters. It didn't take a lot to figure out what was going on either. I've read another book by this author and it was pretty good so maybe this one was just not for me.
    • 5/5
      I couldn't wait to read The Missing after having loved C.L. Taylor's previous two books. I wasn't disappointed. Claire Wilkinson's 15 year old son, Billy, disappeared six months ago without a trace. When the book starts, Claire and her husband are about to do an appeal. The story is told by Claire in the first person and this works really well as she starts to find things out about the people who are closest to her. Every so often throughout the book, there are transcripts of a text conversation that really leave the reader guessing. I veered all the way through between thinking this person, that person, the other person had something to do with Billy's disappearance. Very clever writing on the part of the author.I could barely put this book down. I found it gripping and read it pretty much in two big chunks. The chapters are short and kept me turning the pages, particularly as most of the chapters ended on a cliffhanger so I needed to read a bit more to see what it was all about. I love this author's writing - she writes realistic psychological thrillers, unlike some of the books around where the story sometimes seems too contrived to deliver twists and turns. Great stuff!
    • 4/5
      The Missing from C.L. Taylor is a bit of a difficult book for me to review. My views on it, while overwhelmingly positive, are often tempered by seemingly contradictory points. But here goes.I was initially expecting more of an edge-of-my-seat thriller type of novel and this is not really that type. Some scenes certainly create that effect but on the whole this is a slow burn kind of story. I do think the term gut wrenching is appropriate but with some explanation. When talking about novels we often use that idea to signify something that is both horrible and sudden. While the event of a child going missing is sudden this story picks up months after the disappearance, so we are dealing with the drawn out experience of the many unknowns in such a situation: how, why, who, etc. In real life gut wrenching is generally a wearing down and not a sudden event (though often triggered by such an occurrence). In that respect this is closer to real life than what we regularly find in a novel. If you can adjust your expectations in this regard I believe you will be rewarded.I saw that some couldn't empathize with the characters because they believed them to all be bad people and liars. They certainly lied but I have never met anyone who hasn't. Unfortunately, we lie far too often to those we love, many times thinking we are doing a greater good than the bad of a small lie. Those little lies can get out of hand, especially during a time of crisis. That, I think, more accurately reflects these characters than simply calling them bad as though we are above such things. Would I like to think I would not have told the same lies in their situation? Sure. But I to claim to know, well, that is simply unrealistic. Different lies will affect each reader differently, there were a couple that I really didn't like, but I am not one of the characters and the stories they told fit with their personalities so I was able to understand them even when I disagreed with them. If you really just need one character in a novel to be a perfect angel, then this might not be for you, these are written as real people going through tough times. No angels here.What was probably the biggest negative for me is also something that was necessary in order to show the anguish as well as the story behind each character's own personal hell. It seemed like the set up was taking forever until I shifted my expectation and realized that for this novel it is the journey that moves us at least as much as the resolution. Once I made that shift I found myself much more involved in the story. But at first I just kept wondering when the action would start. This is a psychological thriller but rather than a sharp rise to a resolution the psychological suspense is developed and drawn out (in a good way).All in all I would recommend this book to readers of psychological thrillers with the understanding that this is about the inner workings of Claire's mind (and heart) and, through her eyes, the psychological baggage of the other characters.Reviewed from a copy made available through Goodreads First Reads.
    • 5/5
      The Missing – The Psycho Queen Returns!The Missing is the latest book from psycho thriller queen C. L Taylor, a book that will grab you from the first page through to the last. Cally Taylor has an innate knack of really getting under the skin of her characters and bringing out all their hopes and fears so it brings out the full psychological fears that we have that can be drivers for own actions.The Missing deals with the one thing that all mothers fear, that their child goes missing with no clear reason as to why. Billy Wilkinson disappears in the middle of the night for no real apparent reason. He has been in trouble with the police, school and family for attempting to be a graffiti artist. Claire like any mother blames herself for her youngest child to have run away without a trace.The Missing begins six months after Billy has gone missing and we see that his family are one that are in freefall all punishing themselves as the reason as to why Billy has gone missing. Claire feels this more profoundly than the rest and this begins to affect her mental health as the pressure really piles up on her.Claire rapidly becomes aware that each member of the household seems to have something to hide and she really needs to know what it is if she is to find Billy. Even though they all have their secrets, she still believes that Billy is alive and that none of her family are involved in his disappearance. With her mental health failing she seems to find herself all over Bristol and the surrounding areas, thinking she has just seen Billy alive. While she is having various issues she seems to find herself in different places for which she cannot explain and is unable to explain her behaviour. We feel the pain as she goes through it, we see her psychological breakdown and the torture that is going on in her mind.C. L. Taylor by writing a psychological thriller on the one thing that is precious to many women (as well as men), a child and then pressing all those buttons that equal fear and loathing as well as love and hope. To an extent The Missing is an examination of the modern family and that how we may all live under the same roof do we really know each other, however much we love each other. With the excellent use of social media, we see some of the messages that is commonly referred to as sexting, something that strike a chord of fear in any parent, and the dangers of the internet and the ease of availability of extreme hardcore pornography and abusive images.Cally Taylor once again builds strong characters and uses a strong female protagonist that is believable as are all her characters which really shows the skills of the author. All the way through the book the reader is kept guessing as to where Billy is and who was involved and every time you think you have solved the mystery Taylor throws something in to the plot to which undermines your own confidence in solving the mystery in the next chapter.Once again Cally Taylor has written an excellent thriller that really grabs you from the first page and holds on to you until the last. The Missing is her third psychological thriller and she is rapidly becoming the queen of the genre, she is even able to make Bristol sound interesting!
    • 4/5
      This was my first book by Taylor and I was not sure what to expect. From the blurb, I knew that there was a missing teen and a mother who was going to track him down. The writing is excellent and the storyline was well thought out and original. I really began to care for Claire and her family issues and her realization, at middle age, that her life didn't turn out to be the happy family package she had dreamt of when she walked down the aisle as a young bride--something a lot of people can relate to. The author does a fabulous job of making a connection between the reader and Claire. The story and good writing kept me reading through to the end, though I had hoped for more of a thriller/mystery instead of a family drama/mystery, which this clearly is. I found myself wading through some parts just hoping to get to some action scenes. I wasn't too disappointed though, as it was an enjoyable book that is well deserving of the 4 stars I'm giving it.
    • 2/5
      I'm not entirely sure what to make of this book...
      As the POV switched so often, I didn't feel any sort of attachment to any of the characters, so the deaths really didn't mean much to me. I thought it was interesting how the reader never really quite got to see exactly what the infected did, from a POV chapter. Everything was hinted at, through the remains of the people and animals - and although it was obvious what went on, without a full description of it, it felt like the reader was partially in the dark, like the infected when they attacked.
      As I mentioned previously, none of the characters really drew me in. There were quite a lot of stereotypes - Maddie especially annoyed me; I just really hate the overuse of teen slang in books. Lois was a complete sap. I still don't understand why the virus centred around her, why she was in control, and why Fenstad's family lasted the longest.
      Quite a grim read, although I'm not sure what I was really expecting from the blurb!

      Also posted on my blog, Rinn Reads.