AWOL

In Buell’s thriller, a cold-case inspector investigates a pattern of missing Indigenous girls in Alaska.

Dr. Bethene Dubrow, a psychologist working as a consultant in Analoon, a small village in the hinterlands of Alaska, makes an alarming discovery about female students who have gone missing over a span of years. Annie Brewster, lead inspector with the Cold Case Unit of the Alaska Investigation Bureau, and her partner, Arturo Feliz, take up the case when this information reaches them; they’re grimly certain the peculiar pattern can’t be explained by random chance. The situation is affectingly depicted by the author: rationally, “the lack of girls in three of the five village schools, other than teachers’ children, [must have been] a coincidence. It didn’t feel that way: the great mentor in the sky said there were no coincidences.” The vanishing girls are Indigenous, which adds obstacles to their inquiries, given the culturally closed world from which they come. Annie and Arturo, undaunted, doggedly chase down leads and start to uncover a grisly picture of organized human trafficking that appears to involve a school principal, Alan Prold, rumored to have had inappropriate sexual relations with young village girls. Additionally, Octavia Tallignuit, a young Indigenous girl who was reported to have been drowned by her family in 1990, mysteriously turns up dead years later.

With remarkable lucidity and great suspense, Buell unpacks this densely complicated case, in which unalloyed evil tragically intersects with youthful innocence. Her characters are just as complex as the plot—they’re tightly woven personalities, too dynamic to ignore or be fully understood. Annie is the most memorable character among the cast, a remarkably perceptive detective motivated in part by her own residual trauma from sexual assault. The author sensitively portrays a strange feature of the crimes—they’re basically perpetrated in plain sight, yet conducted with relative impunity. Without offering any simplistic or didactic commentary, Buell sketches a picture of how that can occur—how amoral people can avoid the interference of the decent. At the heart of the book is the peculiar nature of cold cases, and the ways in which they stymie the normal methods of investigation. “In cases proceeding from a missing person, the victim was the investigation. You couldn’t ‘see’ the crime. There often was no obvious evidence, in the classic sense. You were seeking a ghost. The daily habits of the victim became the path to follow, moving out in concentric relationship circles until you found someone who knew something.” The entire book is written in this manner—the prose is impressively clear and concise, as is the way in which the author’s unsentimental, even journalistic descriptions accrue a power of their own, unforced by writerly exertions. Any book that handles the abuse of children courts mawkish melodrama. Buell artfully avoids this trap, and the result is an exceedingly thoughtful and dramatically moving novel.

A stirring crime story with real psychological depth.