Steve Almond's first novel is about a missing-persons case, a subgenre that tends to present a writer with a very 21st-century challenge: How to explain a character's disappearance in an age of cellphones and global positioning systems?
One solution is to set the action in the recent past, with its busy signals and hastily scribbled correspondence. At first glance, Almond seems to have chosen this route in "All the Secrets of the World," which opens in 1981. But the real explanation for his decades-ago story line is much more interesting — he's been writing this book for 30 years.
The author of several short-story collections and nonfiction titles, Almond has crafted an insightful debut novel involving a police investigation that threatens to destroy two families.
Lorena Saenz, the daughter of undocumented immigrants, and Jenny Stallworth, whose parents are rich and influential, are partnering on a middle-school project. Visiting the Stallworths' mansion in Sacramento, Lorena bonds with Jenny's father, Marcus, an academic who studies scorpions. His interest in the 13-year-old soon turns unwholesome, and after her older brother Tony grows suspicious and threatens Marcus, the professor disappears.
To police, there are two plausible explanations. Either Marcus lost his way while doing fieldwork in the mountains, or Tony kidnapped and killed Marcus. Lorena offers another theory: Maybe the unpretentious professor, at odds with his status-conscious wife Rosemary, vanished on purpose.
It's a plot replete with treacherous relationships, punishing landscapes and biblical allusions. Marcus' beguiling but dangerous scorpions serve as an oft-effective metaphor that Almond returns to — perhaps a bit too frequently — throughout the book. Meanwhile, Almond crafts some beautiful prose. A dying character yearns "to ascend, to take his place amid the riot of dead souls and flickering stars that disappeared before dawn lit the world."
Lorena's intelligence and resolve fuel the story. Lest she do something that gets her mother, Graciela, deported, she lives in a "prison of careful habits," Almond writes. Telling a police officer about her relationship with the Stallworths, the normally articulate Lorena can't find the right words — "an awkward moment, so familiar in American life, when the unspoken fact of class rudely presents itself."
But when the moment calls for it, she's bold and galvanizing, a brainy battler. Her perpetually angry brother Tony is an equally credible character, his insecurities and psychological wounds explored in vivid flashback scenes.
