A Mother's Day Of Mystery

LOSING YOU

By Nicci French

St. Martin's. 293 pp. $24.95

Last week we looked at David Levien's "City of the Sun," which began with a 12-year-old American boy vanishing on his paper route one morning. By coincidence, this week's attraction, Nicci French's "Losing You," begins with a 15-year-old English girl vanishing while out throwing papers. But beyond that shared starting point -- and the necessary incompetence of the police -- the two novels have almost nothing in common. In "City of the Sun," we know at the outset that a gang of pedophiles has seized the boy. In "Losing You," it's not clear who has taken the girl, but we soon suspect it was a friend, neighbor or even a family member. In the American book, a huge, two-fisted ex-cop leads the search. In the English novel, the missing girl's mother is the protagonist. Which novel you'd prefer might depend on whether you'd rather read about Superman or Supermom.

The mother's name is Nina Landry, and the story takes place on her 40th birthday in a village on an island off the English coast. Nina is separated from her husband, and as the story opens she and her two children and her new boyfriend are about to depart for a Christmas vacation in the Florida Keys. The kids are Charlie (actually Charlotte), the 15-year-old, and Jackson, who's about 12. In a hectic and confusing morning, Nina's car breaks down, a bunch of people show up for a surprise birthday party at her house, and Charlie vanishes. The usual scenario unfolds: nervous calls to friends and neighbors and finally to the police, who essentially say, "She's a teenager -- she'll turn up."

Nina, frustrated and fearing foul play, begins her own investigation: "Perhaps Charlie had been snatched randomly, and there were no clues or patterns. Or perhaps I would find, among the clutter of her teenage life, some sign. I began with the drawers of her desk." She finds her daughter's diary and gains access to her e-mail. Unsurprisingly, she finds there was a great deal she hadn't known about 15-year-old Charlie: "My daughter had been living in the house with me, talking to me, eating meals and doing her homework, and meanwhile everything important in her life had been happening elsewhere in a world I knew nothing about." She learns that other girls had been bullying Charlie and that her daughter had a boyfriend she hadn't known about. He becomes a suspect, of course, along with a Goth teenager who admires Charlie.

Nina's estranged husband, Rory, turns up, less than sober, and makes himself suspect by lying to the police. Nina's current boyfriend, the one she was supposed to fly to Florida with, is never seen. He keeps calling, saying there's a tie-up on the highway, but in fact there's simply no need for him because this is a one-woman show. As the day progresses and the police klutz about, Nina grows increasingly hysterical, but she keeps making discoveries. She finds the body of a teenage girl, one of Charlie's friends, adding to fears of a serial killer. She confronts people, calling them liars and ignoring the police demands to restrain herself. "She's gone mad," one of her neighbors declares, although this woman is prejudiced, since Nina once had a fling with her husband. The novel's greatest strength is its cool-eyed portrait of an English village, both the adults and the teenagers, who are shown to coexist in near-total ignorance of one another.

The authors -- the English husband-and-wife team of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, who write as Nicci French -- want us to sympathize with Nina, and up to a point we do, as the poor woman imagines her daughter a prisoner or raped or murdered. But in their determination to make Nina an all-conquering heroine, they go completely over the top.

Let us stipulate that no human emotion is more powerful or admirable than a mother's love for her children. A lot of fine literature is based on that fact. But it remains possible for writers to go too far. Nina's hysteria becomes maddening and counterproductive. Then, after dark, having fixed upon a suspect, she follows him in her car in a remote area, a pursuit that would be close to impossible, engages him in a highly improbable physical confrontation and proceeds to perform superhuman feats of strength. The tired, confused mom with a sprained ankle has morphed into an action hero, and it doesn't work. Readers who want to be inspired by a mother's love may buy these scenes, but those who demand some element of probability in fiction are going to find this novel's ending simply silly. I wanted to like Nina, but in time she became Nancy Drew, grown up and neurotic, having a really bad day.