Lost Boy, Lost Girl

A week after Nancy Underhill, a Millhaven wife and mother, kills herself for no reason anyone can name, her fifteen year old son Mark vanishes without a trace. His uncle, the novelist Tim Underhill, comes home for the funeral and stays for the disappearance, and Straub braids the two mysteries into one of his tightest books: a possible serial killer working the neighborhood, a police theory that fits and satisfies nobody, and the house.

The house is the novel's black heart: an abandoned property on Michigan Street that Mark, in his last weeks, had become obsessed with, photographing it, breaking in, mapping its wrongness, the interior built with corridors that should not fit, a hidden room, and a history that connects to Millhaven's foundational monster, a killer whose crimes the city paved over decades ago. Tim's investigation runs on his nephew's traces, journals, computer files, the testimony of Mark's best friend, and on Straub's late method, the story assembling from documents and versions, including chapters that are explicitly Tim's own novelist's reconstruction, true in every way except the way the police would need. Whether Mark's fate is horror or something stranger, the book holds open to the last page: a lost girl haunts the house too, and what the two lost children find in each other reads, in Tim's telling, almost like rescue.

Around three hundred and thirty pages, the leanest of late Straub.

Best for readers who want the haunted house and the true crime story fused, and an ending that grief writes one way and hope another.