Sadly, the disappearance of a child is a semiregular event: the Amber Alert, the pictures on Laundromat bulletin boards, the months or years of diminishing attention. Often lost in the news is the story of the tears and prayers of the child's family. In Descent, Tim Johnston's first adult novel (after his prize-winning story collection Irish Girl), the focus is on Wisconsin's Courtland family after their 18-year-old track-star daughter, Caitlin, disappears during a run with her brother, Sean, while on a family vacation in the Colorado mountains.
In measured, occasionally lyrical prose, Johnston builds the narrative of Caitlin's abduction around the separate stories of her gradually disintegrating family. Her father, Grant, stays in Colorado to continue the search of "all the millions of true, godless places a person might be." Her mother, Angela, returns with Sean to Wisconsin to try for some normalcy in their lives--she teaching and he back in high school. While Caitlin struggles to remain optimistic in the wilderness, Grant takes odd jobs at Colorado ranches as his hope for her return fades, Angela becomes unglued and suicidal and Sean takes the family's truck on an aimless, guilt-ridden road trip out West.
Each has weaknesses beyond the loss of Caitlin, and Johnston takes many digressions from the underlying uncertainty as to who took her, why, whether or not she'll return and what she'll find if she does. Descent is more than an abduction mystery. Sean and Grant have a taciturn conversation that plainly targets two overarching questions: "Do you think we'll ever feel normal again?" and "I don't know. What's normal?" --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.