Missing: A Family's Triumph in the Tragedy No Parent Ever Wants to Face

by Fay Overly

Genres: Nonfiction

210 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

Reviews

[Fishface · Rating 2 out of 5]

I blasted through this in a few hours. The agenda of the author appears to have been to get me to accept Christ as my savior. There is even a list of Bible citations at the back AND a list of Christian counseling agencies. Yikes. The grim story of a 13-year-old girl's disappearance and the agonizing search, discovery, investigation, arrest and court process are almost totally obscured by the fears of the poor girl's mother that she -- mom, not the dead daughter -- hasn't really been saved because maybe she really hasn't accepted Christ into her heart. Her daughter is lying dead in the woods, and this is what mom lies awake thinking about? The author isn't just writing down what her friends, the grieving parents, told her to write down -- she comes clean at the end of the book about how she was over there with them every day, sometimes more than once a day, biting her tongue because she didn't want to push her own religious ideas on them too much. To this writer, the happy ending isn't that the killer was caught and jugged. To her, mom getting 'saved' was the only thing that mattered. Her other children were completely lost in the sauce while all this was going on, and in the author's opinion, the only effect the murder and court process had on mom's marriage was the effect that her getting 'saved' had on their partnership. We learned almost nothing about the killer and we never find out whether the devastated parents got any of their burning questions answered -- except, of course, the one about "am I saved?" We have no idea how this affected the community as a whole, whether any laws were changed because of this rat bastidge, what the jury made of him and where everyone is today and how they are doing. Way to miss the point, Mrs. Overly.