Discover Morag Joss in 'Among the Missing'

AMONG THE MISSING, by Morag Joss. Delacorte Press, 255 pp. $25.

Morag Joss would be the best crime writer you've never heard of -- except she isn't really a crime writer. Which doesn't mean crimes aren't committed in her four stand-alone novels or that the novels lack tension. The last chapter of her latest, "Among the Missing," would give the thrill-seeking readers of Patricia Cornwell all the agita they could stand.

So who is Morag Joss? Born in Scotland, she came to the attention of Anglophiliac mystery devotees with three nicely developed, if unexceptional, mysteries set in Bath, England, featuring a young, classical cellist --

Yo-Yo Ma meets Columbo. P.D. James was among her early champions. But then Joss took her writing to another level with "Half Broken Things," a shattering novel that was closer to the work of Ruth Rendell's Barbara Vine books for its psychological edginess and mournful narrative.

"Puccini's Ghosts" and "The Night Following" bent the rules of crime and suspense further. (The biggest mystery was whether there'd be a crime at all in "Puccini.")

Now with "Among the Missing," Joss' writing is so shapely and her plotting so meticulously developed that you sense the presence of such literary luminaries as William Trevor and Alice Munro as much as Rendell and James. Influences aside, the world she creates is her own, a fully sufficient artistic landscape in which social misfits and outsiders yearn for one last shot at redemption, often with each other.

Take the three main characters here. Ron drives aimlessly about Scotland after his release from jail; the former school bus driver caused the deaths of six children when he fell asleep behind the wheel. Silva is an illegal immigrant writing letters to a husband and child she fears may have been drowned in a bridge collapse. Then there's Annabel, amazed to find she's pregnant at 42. That's not her name, but the one she's adopted from the baby who died under the supervision of her mother. She's running away from her fiance, who, upon learning of her pregnancy, told her to get an abortion or get lost. The three eventually will cross paths after the bridge tragedy, and whether they'll end up giving each other solace or further devastation is the book's real mystery.

If all this sounds unbearably depressing, Joss' great talent is that the writing soars above any such bleak-chic concerns. The world may be weary of her characters, but each confronts the world back with a mixture of passion and compassion.

Ron, taking a look around him when he's released, realizes "in not one of these places was his presence relevant." Of such realizations are serial killers born, but Joss has better things in mind for Ron. And for us. As the narrative shifts from one character to another, from first person to third person, Joss varies the pace from leisurely observation of people coming together or falling away to breakneck tension in wondering who's going to do what to whom.

"Among the Missing" is further proof that Morag Joss should be among those included in any discussion of our best writers -- in any genre.