Rating: 2/5
Review:
Too long and a bit silly
I'm afraid I didn't get on nearly as well with I Am Missing as a lot of other reviewers.
The set-up is excellent: David Raker, a specialist in missing persons, is contacted by a man with amnesia to try to find out who he is. It's an intriguing premise and I thought the opening of the book was very good. The story is narrated by Raker and I liked his voice, too, so the whole thing was promising. However, this didn't last. Raker is no fan of concision, so we get an awful lot of it-might-be-this or perhaps-it's-that which doesn’t add up to a lot, plus a great deal of over descriptive scene-setting and it gets pretty wearing. Later, too, Weaver begins to resort increasingly to clichés like "Slowly, this was heading somewhere. *Somewhere bad.*" I wholeheartedly agreed with "slowly," but really, "Somewhere bad," as an italicised sentence? It's pretty cheesy, as is the rather sentimental ending. Weaver can write well, so it's a shame to mar decent prose with this sort of stuff.
The other problem is the plot holes and absurdities, like the frankly incomprehensible failure to go to the police with vital evidence when the resulting police work would help Raker hugely. Twice (!) he deliberately puts himself alone in inescapable places which he knows are controlled by those who wish him dead. A succession of slightly implausible villains are going to kill him, but carefully explain to him everything they have done, including their motivations, before…I wouldn't dream of including spoilers, and I'm sure you can't guess. And so on and so on. I did finish the book, but 540-odd pages of this was an awful lot it was a bit of a chore and I did get very fed up with it.
This might make an OK, brain-off beach read but as a plausible, enjoyable thriller I can only give it a very lukewarm recommendation.
(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)
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