The Missing

"A taut, incisive look at two lives as they slowly implode." 

-Kirkus Reviews

"Ben Tanzer's latest novel, The Missing, combines master storytelling with an impeccable understanding of the human condition. It's an unflinching look at the way our frailties and failings cause ripples that reach out through space and time, and harm the ones we love most. Tanzer, in his own inimitable way, shows us that learning how something happened is the only way to fix what's broken, and heal the parts of ourselves that are not whole."

-Giano Cromley, author of American Mythology and The Last Good Halloween

"The Missing is a hold-your-breath story exploring the many layers of love in a life, in a marriage, in a family. Vices and regret frozen in thin ice, nostalgia comforts and chokes. Ben Tanzer has written a book like a cigarette-smoke blurring out and swirling around what it means to be married, what it means to be a parent, what it means to be human...sinking, sinking into the mystery of what's truly missing. How and where to find it?"

-Leesa Cross-Smith, author Goodbye Earl, Half-Blown Rose, and This Close to Okay

"The Missing is a lightning strike of a book--one moment Hannah and Gabriel's only child is with them; in the next, she's gone. This he-said, she-said psychological excavation of a marriage and a disappearance makes clear that above all, we are the product of our childhoods, of our torments and obsessions. In his propulsive new novel, Ben Tanzer writes with haunting insight and sympathy about the human heart and its implacable, inexplicable contradictions."

 -Christine Sneed, author of Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos and The Virginity of Famous Men

"In this heady story of unwilling empty nesters, Ben Tanzer surfaces sharp insights about family, middle age, and the skins that people shed-and regrow-as they crash through the lake of life. If twenty years has ever felt like a blink, you will feel very seen by The Missing."

-Chris L. Terry, author of Black Card and Zero Fade, co-editor of Black Punk Now