The Missing Person Book

A powerful debut set in New Mexico over a long hot summer of surprises and discoveries.

Lynn Fleming happily abandoned dusty Albuquerque to study art history in New York, but when her younger brother disappears she reluctantly answers their mother’s summons and returns home. Although she soon finds Wylie among the eco-warriors for whom he’s a philosopher king, she begins to realize how much else is still missing. Her memories of her late cherished father are compromised by her mother’s relationship with a married man. And her fascination with two paintings her father left behind leads her to question everything she’d believed about her parents’ marriage and, by extension, her own behavior. Meanwhile, her attempt to regain Wylie’s affection is unsettled by her affair with one of his cohorts, even as the pranks they play–in order to protect the landscape they see being violated all around them–grow increasingly serious and then spiral out of control, putting everyone at risk.

A story of homecoming and coming-of-age, of convictions shaken and regained, of unspeakable loss and hard-won reconciliation, The Missing Person is funny and piercing throughout, a brilliant beginning to a bright new career.

Publishers Weekly

Although the title makes this sound like a mystery, it is a knowing and witty take on family ties, the politics of art and academia, and eco-terrorism. When art history graduate student Lynn Fleming finds out that Wylie, her younger brother, is missing or at least hasn't been heard from and can't be located Lynn returns home to Albuquerque to try to find him. Since she left to go to school in New York, she has become a confirmed New Yorker, and the thought of Albuquerque, "the capital of nowhere," makes her shudder, though she reluctantly appreciates Duke City's "scruffy charm." When someone in Albuquerque tells her, "I don't know anybody like you," she "almost choked in exasperation. New York, I wanted to say, was full of people exactly like me." Lynn finds Wylie easily and, in the process, strikes up a romance with Angus, one of Wylie's partners in eco-crime, a sunny and charming plumber whose darker side is gradually revealed. As the schemes of the group Angus leads get riskier and more dangerous, Lynn finds herself becoming involved with their actions and sympathizing with their philosophy, but not their methods or zeal. An interesting subplot about a Mew Mexican woman artist, whose work becomes fodder for Lynn's doctoral dissertation, is woven believably into the narrative. This promising debut is intelligent, insightful and often bitterly funny. Agent, Amy Williams at Collins McCormick. (May 6) FYI: A story by Ohlin will appear in Best American Short Stories 2005. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.