THE 37TH HOUR

A dazzling debut about a missing-persons cop whose husband goes missing.

Minnesota Detective Sarah Pribek is impetuous and instinctive, a maverick who’s just plain good at finding lost people. Sarah shares credit for the honing of her talent with two mentors. From Detective Genevieve Brown, her partner, she’s learned how to shade an interrogation, how to modulate between hard and soft—a skill essential in missing-persons work, since so much of the truth-seeking involves witnesses who don’t know they’re lying. From her taciturn, difficult, accomplished husband, Detective Mike Shiloh, she’s learned something more abstract: that detachment is often the key to a complex, confusing investigation, the detective’s ability to listen inward for a certain “still, small voice.” And then, suddenly, Mike, en route to Quantico, Virginia, to begin FBI training, vanishes. Though Sarah loves her husband passionately, she has never fully understood him. How then to explain the inexplicable, a disappearance that makes absolutely no sense? To her colleagues, however, there’s little mystery to it. Enigmatic Mike Shiloh, they say, has simply chosen a predictably eccentric method of deserting his wife. Sarah doesn’t think so, not for a minute. She thinks it’s time to find a way to listen hard for that still, small voice.

Watch this writer. She does it all: plots intelligently, writes elegantly, and creates characters who compel attention the old-fashioned way—by making you believe in them.