20 greatest works of fiction about New Orleans

The Missing (Cover image via Vintage)

16. The Missing

In Tim Gautreaux’s 2009 novel, The Missing, New Orleans and its environs are the stage for a deeply dramatic, even epic tale of trauma and revenge. Yet, don’t think that The Missing glories in the violence depicted in its pages. All of the evil that its characters do, petty or not, has serious consequences.

It all starts with Sam Simoneaux. He’s had a pretty horrific start to life as the only survivor of the pointless massacre of his family. Though he was too young to form memories of his parents and siblings, their absence and imagined presences loom large throughout his life. The infant Sam is rescued and raised by his uncle, only to be sent to World War I as a young man.

Sam narrowly escapes physical injury during the war and returns home to New Orleans. He’s hired on as a department store security guard, where he fails to stop a little girl’s abduction. Sam is fired from his job and soon finds himself adrift in the city.

Eventually, Sam decides to pursue the two thugs who took her, moving through the city in pursuit. Eventually, he makes his way deep into the Arkansas wilderness, where he finds that he is more connected to the missing girl than just by happenstance.

Along the way, he also learns the identity of the people who killed his birth family. Sam is therefore faced with a serious, earth-shattering question: should he seek vengeance or not? The nature of revenge, including the way it worms its way into a life and never seems to end, is the crux of The Missing. It’s also a well-written, if occasionally devastating, exploration of one man’s trauma and his life.