When a nine-year-old girl goes missing, the entire neighborhood is upended. William Wooler comes home one afternoon to what he believes will be an empty house to lick his wounds after finding out the affair he's been having with a neighbor is over. He's surprised to find his rather difficult daughter, Avery, there having been sent home from choir practice for some indiscretion. William loses his temper with Avery, then leaves the house again. When Avery's brother gets home, she isn't there so he calls his mother, Erin, who calls William and then the police. At the start of the investigation, no one admits to having any knowledge of Avery's whereabouts or of having seen anything suspicious. But it eventually comes out that William saw his daughter at home that day. Then someone says Avery had talked about having an older boyfriend and an anonymous tip comes in that claims to have seen Avery getting in a young man's car on the day of her disappearance. As lives and relationships fracture, the police follow up on every lead, hoping to find Avery before it's too late. This story races along and the pages fly by, but I found the ending to be quite anticlimactic.