I've been trying to lighten up my reading lately by adding romantic
suspense novels to the mysteries, thrillers and suspense novels
that are my usual book diet. I'm finding out that this may not have
been such a good idea, so I'm alerting our Bookreporter.com readers
at the start of this review that I may have a previously
unrecognized bias against romantic suspense (even though, or
perhaps because, I used to write it myself). With that caveat,
here's the review:

Joy Fielding's latest novel, LOST, is a somewhat lighthearted look
at a potentially serious subject: a lost child. That the child in
question is 21 years old doesn't make much, if any, difference in
the seriousness of the mother's feelings --- as any mother of grown
children could verify. This lightheartedness makes for some
enjoyable reading, but on the whole it provided an uneasiness in me
that was never resolved --- not even at the end of the book --- and
I found that to be a major flaw.

The main character is Cindy Carver, a 42-year-old divorced
housewife with a part-time job that is more important to her
self-esteem than to her finances. Her ex-husband Tom is a lawyer
who provided Cindy with a generous settlement, including a house
and an income for life. In spite of this, Tom is presented as a
philanderer and a shark, a man who understands the 20th/21st
century end-justifies-the-means ethics extremely well and embraces
them wholeheartedly. The grownup child who goes missing at the very
start of the book is Julia, a model and aspiring actress: age 21,
six feet tall, size two and gorgeous. Julia resembles her mother,
so we know Cindy is also gorgeous if not quite so tall and
suffering somewhat from middle age.

Heather is Cindy's younger daughter, who is 19. Heather has a
boyfriend named Duncan whose parents died some years back in an
accident, and he has been living in Cindy's house and sleeping with
Heather since they were 15 --- this with Cindy's blessing. But
Julia, until right before the book began, was living with her
father since the divorce when she was 14 --- only her father's
marriage to a woman just a few years older than herself has made
Julia leave her father's house and return to live with Cindy,
theoretically until Julia can afford her own apartment. Seven years
after their divorce, Cindy still has strong reactions to the mere
mention of Tom's name, and she calls his new wife The Cookie.
Cindy's guilt over having lost Julia to Tom was already huge before
Julia goes missing one September day and sets the plot in
motion.

One might get the idea from all of the above that Cindy is less
than fully in charge of her own life, and one would be correct. Yet
Cindy is far more competent than she allows herself to know and
even more competent than she seems most of the time.

One of Fielding's specialties is writing about such women.
Generally in the course of Fielding's books, the women learn
lessons from being in truly tough situations and are far wiser by
the conclusion. A good example from a few years ago is SEE JANE
RUN.

In LOST Cindy needs and gets, though she is frequently overwhelmed
by the support of her sister, her mother and two close female
friends. The women are all good characters, well written and always
amusing. Early on, one of the female friends introduces Cindy to
Neil Macfarlane, who is also a good character --- in fact, he's the
kind of man most divorced women would go to great lengths to meet
--- and he falls into Cindy's lap via a blind date. But by then,
Julia's disappearance has taken hold and Cindy is not in a very
good place to begin a relationship with anyone. That this does not
deter Neil in the least is to his credit.

LOST is well written. The dialogue is always entertaining. The
characters are engaging and fun. There are some fascinating insider
tidbits about the entertainment business (Tom is an entertainment
lawyer) and the book takes place during the Toronto film festival.
The Toronto setting is heightened by the fact that Toronto is Joy
Fielding's hometown.

However, there is no depth here. The people in this book are
skating along on the surface of life, leaving unexplored a whole
lot of darkness and seriousness beneath. This bothered me. Maybe it
won't bother you. If it doesn't, you can read LOST and have a good
time.