Overall, “Missing, Presumed” (the first book in a projected series featuring Detective Sergeant Bradshaw) is involving and well-paced the shifting points of view hold off any threat of monotony. Edith’s mother, Miriam, a general practice physician in the shadow, and somewhat under the thumb, of her famous surgeon husband, comes in just behind Manon in point-of-view pages.

The perspective of Detective Sergeant Manon Bradshaw predominates, and includes a personal life is not so much a subplot as a parallel plot. The narrative point of view shifts regularly, a technique which has become a staple of the contemporary suspense novel. Writers aim to write accordingly, keeping all of the questions tantalizingly in play.īritish procedural thriller “Missing, Presumed” by Susie Steiner does an excellent job keeping the relevant information coming, and building, while withholding just what has become of accomplished and well-connected Edith Hind, a Cambridge University graduate student who has vanished under suspicious circumstances from a cottage shared with her boyfriend. She may also be located anywhere on the moral and agency spectrum from earnest do-gooder caught up in circumstances to diabolical mastermind.

Readers start from the premise that the missing woman may turn out to be dead or alive, of course. Since “Gone Girl” broke on the thriller horizon in 2012, the central trope of the attractive and apparently clean-cut young woman who goes missing has been transformed. Data: Penguin-Random House, 368 pages, $27 (paperback out Tuesday, $16)

Missing presumed by susie steiner