The Missing by Thomas Eidson
HarperCollins $105
The Missing is a re-release of Eidson's 1995 western, The Last Ride, repackaged to coincide with the film version. The cover is about the only thing novel about this story. It opens in New Mexico in the 1880s when the terminally ill Samuel Jones turns up on the doorstep of his daughter Maggie, to make amends after abandoning her and her mother 30 years ago to live with an Apache squaw. Maggie's daughter Lily is kidnapped by the Lame One, a grotesquely deformed Apache witch. Maggie and Samuel pursue them across the desert. The seemingly endless chase is punctuated with clashes between the god-fearing Maggie and her pagan father over his efforts to convert Maggie's younger daughter, Dot, to Indian sorcery. Eidson burdens the book through unsurprising brushes with death and a maudlin reconciliation.