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Missing Sam

Christine Tran

Ali’s wife Sam disappears the morning after they have a bitter late-night argument, and she veers from concern to fear that Sam has left her. Restrained by humiliation and her erroneous belief that the police require a 48-hour waiting period, Ali kicks off a series of damaging mistakes by delaying reporting Sam’s disappearance. She reluctantly tells detectives about their fight but deletes their heated texts and fumbles media interviews. Meanwhile, Sam’s disappearance stretches into weeks as the leads dry up, and public speculation about Ali’s suspicious behavior swells. When Ali is shunned and abused in the artsy Cleveland Heights neighborhood she’d considered a cocoon, her estranged father provides unexpected comfort. Months later, Ali’s prayers are answered when Sam, battered and blindfolded, is dumped near their home. But Sam’s abductor remains at large. Umrigar explores the ripple effect of violent crime in gut-wrenching detail, capturing the callous intrusions Ali and Sam suffered, the space for redemption it created in their family relationships, and their determined devotion to each other. Healing from the abduction and lifelong patterns of abuse and discrimination, Sam and Ali find strength in corners of their lives that they’d written off. Gritty hope and redemption glimmer throughout this must-read literary crime story.

The Seattle Times [read...]

From "5 January Books that Remind Us that Reinvention Isn't Easy"

Thrity Umrigar’s Missing Sam (out Jan. 27 from Algonquin, $29) asks its central question obliquely. Not ‘where is Sam?’ But ‘what happens to the person left behind?’

The novel opens in the small, brittle space of a marriage after an argument, widening into something much lonelier. When Sam disappears, her absence quickly fills with noise — police interest, media speculation, the assumptions of neighbors — until grief itself feels crowded out.

For Ali, Sam’s wife, mourning becomes an act performed under observation. Every gesture is read for meaning; every emotion is weighed for plausibility. Umrigar, the author of Honor and The Space Between Us, structures the book around this slow constriction, returning again and again to the ways trauma rearranges intimacy and identity. The mystery advances, but quietly, almost reluctantly, as if aware that answers cannot restore what has already been altered.

Suspense builds from recognition — the familiar unease of knowing how quickly sympathy thins, how love can be recast as motive, how loss becomes spectacle when the wrong person is grieving. It leaves the reader with a sharpened sense of how fragile belonging can be, and how easily loss exposes the conditions under which compassion is extended, or withheld.

The Washington Post [read...]

From "6 Noteworthy Books for January"

Aliya and her wife, Sam, end up in a bitter argument after a party reignites long-simmering tensions. Hoping to shake off the negativity, Sam leaves on her usual morning run — but this time she doesn’t return, launching a frantic search that quickly turns Aliya’s world upside down. When she reports Sam missing, Aliya is met not with sympathy but with suspicion, intensified by her identity as a gay Muslim daughter of immigrants. Umrigar’s domestic thriller is propulsive and provocative, as the initial focus on Sam’s disappearance broadens to consider the far-reaching effects of prejudice and pressures to conform. (Algonquin, Jan. 27)

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