Disappearing Gypsies

Who better to solve a Gypsy mystery than a Gypsy detective? And so years after Rose Janko apparently walks away from her husband and newborn son, her father hires private detective Ray Lovell to find her in Stef Penney's novel The Invisible Ones. The father has done some detective work of his own and found that Lowell has Gypsy blood himself. So perhaps he can be trusted and, just as important, be trusted by the family he must probe for information about Rose's disappearance.

That isn't easy, for Ivo Janko, her husband, and the rest of the family seem uninterested in finding her and aren't even sure why she left. Ivo says Rose just couldn't handle motherhood, especially because her son, Christo, has a crippling disease that affects most of the males in the family. Lovell is told Ivo had the disease as a boy but was cured after a trip to Lourdes. A similar trip for Christo brings no change in his condition.

The detective begins to suspect Rose may have been murdered, especially when bones, possibly those of a young woman, are found buried nearby. When she is discovered alive and well, the mystery seems to be over. Instead it has only deepened, especially after Lovell is poisoned and nearly killed and Ivo himself disappears.

The novel benefits from having two narrators. Lovell does the honors for a bit more than half of the book, but the rest of the story is told by JJ, an observant Gypsy boy who becomes the family's conscience, as well as the reader's best guide to the lives of these people who live in trailers and rarely put down roots.

If not as beautifully written as Penney's first novel, The Tenderness of Wolves, her second book nevertheless entertains from first to last. It may feature a detective, but to call it a mystery would be to shortchange it.