Detective Bart Moy is a policeman returned to the small wheat-belt country town where he was raised by his father, now ailing. Like the protagonist of Time’s Long Ruin, Bart’s father is also the significant figure in his life, his mother having died young. Having lost his own son to an accident in the big smoke, where he had been until the tragedy a promising detective, and subsequently his marriage, Bart is now damaged and severely weakened. So far, so familiar (think Cashin in Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore). As the sole detective in the small country town of Guilderton, Bart is so unmotivated and unreliable that his colleagues have nicknamed him ‘Mr Slow’. He is overweight, he can’t sleep; in his own words he ‘doesn’t care anymore’. His grief is deep and visceral, and likely to overwhelm him at any moment. He also clearly resents the fact that, despite having grown up in the town, because of his years of absence he is now regarded as an outsider. Bart is not particularly self-destructive, in the usual manner of jaded fictional detectives; instead there is something childlike about his character (late at night he collects golf balls from the local course, as he did when he was young). And yet Bart isn’t self-pitying. It is hard to feel self-pity when, as a policeman, he has been exposed to the worst excesses of human behaviour, and is therefore well aware that there are others far worse off. He is practical and matter-of-fact, likeable and wants to be liked.

The novel begins with the disturbing abduction of a young boy, a scene told through the boy’s eyes. It happens in a flash, and so quickly does the scene of the abduction return to the quotidian that witnesses to the event have trouble believing it might have happened. But one man knows what he saw, and Bart Moy is tasked to investigate. Haunted by images of his dead son, Bart begins the search, although the general consensus is that the boy isn’t from the area and might not be missing at all.

When the boy reappears, so traumatised and distrustful that he refuses to communicate what has happened to him, the novel takes a distinctive turn. Where the traditional crime fiction hero would now muster the energy or welcome the opportunity to throw himself into the investigation, leading the reader through the false turns and blind alleys of the narrative while coming into contact with a cast of eccentric characters, this doesn’t happen in One Boy Missing. Even after taking on the responsibility of the investigation, Bart remains his ineffectual self. As a policeman he might even be described as incompetent – you certainly wouldn’t want him investigating the murder of a loved one.

What Bart is good at, however – this defines the novel and gives it gravitas – is communicating with the boy, who until Bart gains his trust refuses to provide his name. Bart draws the boy into his life, and that of his father, and this parallel and personally invested investigation is a nice shadowplay to the usual police means of garnering information. This, of course, takes time, and Bart justifies this to his superiors as necessary to the continuing investigation, but the reader is never sure. Bart has lost his son, and this precocious boy (at the age of nine, he knows which of the periodic table’s elements is the most common) soon moves under Bart’s roof and becomes a surrogate son. Bart is clearly a caring man, and despite his father’s old-man crankiness, he too comes to care deeply for the boy.

The novel becomes almost entirely domestic in its focus, a kind of anti-procedural procedural, in that Bart continues to feel little urgency about identifying those who have caused the boy so much suffering. Instead, the novel becomes a study in character, masculinity, and specifically the relationships between fathers and sons. Much time is spent with the three getting to know one another, as more and more of the boy’s story becomes apparent. At the centre of their relationship, revealed just as slowly as the boy’s story, is the fable-like narrative of Bart’s paternal ancestor, who, after his daughter’s tragic early death, sought a photographer to pose her in the embrace of her loving parents, as a memento. There is a mystery at the source of this family story, which hints at themes important to the developing relationship between Bart, his father, and the boy, and it is nicely folded into the larger story, which contains some deftly written passages and sharp insights into character and place.