Lost and found

As the title suggests, Lisa Jewell's 2016 novel I Found You is a missing-person novel, although more accurately it is a missing-persons novel. Several characters are missing, in one way or another, during the course of her story, including a central character who is missing his entire identity.

Alice Lake lives in a remote English seacoast village with her three children, each with a different father. Now there's a man missing from her life, an empty spot in her bed, and when she finds a man on the beach who remembers nothing about his past, she begins to imagine that he might fill it. Because he is missing a name, she calls him Frank. For all she knows, he might be a murderer, yet hope drives her to welcome him into her home.

Meanwhile, hours away, an Eastern European woman called Lilly, who has recently married a British man, becomes worried when Carl Monrose fails to come home from work. When the police use the missing man's passport to try to find him, they discover that, officially at least, he doesn't even exist.

The novel's third leg, set back in 1993, involves a family of four spending a holiday in a seacoast town. Graham, or Gray as he prefers to be called, is in his late teens and protective of his younger sister, Kirsty, especially when an older boy named Mark starts hanging around her. Gray tries to warn both her and their parents that Mark acts strange and should not be trusted. Then he fails to take his own advice, and disaster occurs.

Of course, these three threads eventually weave together, and they do so in surprising ways. There are other missing people in this story, but to say who they are would reveal too much.

This is a novel, though contrived, that one will read at a breakneck speed. If Jewell's title reveals something about the plot, it also reveals something about how it ends.