THE MOMENT SHE WAS GONE

The indefatigable Hunter, last seen teaming up with his own alter ego Ed McBain (Candyland, 2001), returns solo in this tale of a twin sister gone missing—and more than missing.

Annie Gulliver’s been through a lot. Her parents’ volatile marriage split up when she was only five; her mistrustful teenaged brother Andy, on a grand tour of Scandinavia with her and their no-nonsense mother Helen, trailed her to make sure her Stockholm crush Sven didn’t try anything, well, Swedish; she’s picked up malaria in Papua New Guinea and unwelcome attention during her garage band’s tour of redneck country. And she’s put her family through a lot too, crashing in Andy and his bookseller wife Maggie’s tiny apartment and waking them with her tantric mantras, sponging off Helene when her X-rated jewelry designs don’t sell, attacking Maggie with a hammer in a fit of pique, abusing everyone who tries to help her. Now that she’s walked out still again, Andy has to face the possibility that there’s something wrong with Annie beyond her misadventures—something wrong with her tales of misadventures themselves. What if she never was in Tiananmen Square, the FBI isn’t following her, the best friend who’s paying her HMO bills doesn’t exist, she wasn’t raped by four villagers during her recent trip to Sicily, and the psychiatrist there who packed her back to America in Andy’s custody was right when he said she was schizophrenic? What if Annie’s problems come from inside her—or from the family that’s tried so hard to love and protect her? And what if Andy’s really known this all along?

Hunter shrewdly balances sitcom domestic scrapes and japes with genre-issue melodramatics: a dysfunctional family portrait that’s sharper and deeper than either formula would allow on its own.