Losing a child has to be the most devastating thing that can happen to a parent.
Losing a child and not knowing how or where he or she is has to triple that effect.
Jamie Gabriel is a normal 13 year old kid. He’s a good kid who does well in school and who’s parents have taught him to be responsible. He leaves at 6:00 am to do his regular paper route one morning and simply vanishes.
Carol and Paul Gabriel call the police, put out hundreds of flyers and pay for several private investigators but their son appears to have simply vanished. The local police are not working the case and now 14 months have passed since Jamie’s disappearance.
They meet with Captain Pomeroy to follow up on what the police are doing, and when he’s called out of the office for a moment, Carol sneaks a peek into Jamie’s file on the Captain’s desk. She’s horrified to discovered that in the 14 months since Jamie’s disappearance, only 22-1/2 man hours have been recorded on the case and she confronts the Captain with this fact he blusters his way in defense, but in reality, he’s defenseless. Carol rushes from the office, totally demoralized and crushed by the discovery. Paul leaves more slowly and on the way out, one of the patrolmen stops him and hands him a card belonging to a Private Investigator.
At first Paul is reluctant to call Frank Behr. They have already hired and fired two PI’s who billed exhorbitant amounts for fancy laser print reports that amount to the same thing — they have no clue what happened to Jamie and no clue where he might be.
But Paul is also reluctant to let the matter of his son die and so he contacts Frank who resists taking the case. Paul leaves the file with Frank anyway and returns home.
Against his better judgement, Frank reads the file and is drawn into the dilemma the Gabriel’s are facing and so begins an investigation that leads him into the deepest depths of human depravity.
City of the Sun by David Levien
Published by Anchor Books 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-38720-2
