Family pets are so often objects of joy and love, but the appearance of Bonnie, the Rutherford family’s beloved retriever, was a malignant omen on a chilly Sunday in August as the Scottish summer waned. The first note of a discordant song that fractures the lives of Gordon and Sarah. A sole black Adidas sandal is gripped in Bonnie’s mouth, the sandal’s owner, Gordon and Sarah’s 7-year-old son Rory, nowhere to be seen.
Earlier, he’d headed with Bonnie to the local beach out the front of the family home on the west coast of Scotland, wearing his Kilmarnock football top, shorts and two black sandals.
Gordon had been meant to watch Rory, as law firm partner Sarah spent the Sunday afternoon working on her laptop at the kitchen table. Instead, he’d been absorbed as he worked on his own book on Scottish ballads. He was slightly worse for wear, like many other locals who’d over-indulged during the village’s annual gala day at the community gardens the day before.
So Gordon had left boy and dog to their play, in the garden and then beyond.
Would it be their family’s last happy memory?
Award-winning novelist Liam McIlvanney, a professor at the University of Otago, may be a self-confessed “slow motion crime writer” who doesn’t produce a book a year like many peers, but The Good Father demonstrates once more why his tales are always well worth the wait.
What could be worse than your child disappearing? McIlvanney guides readers deep into a story of parental nightmares and small-town secrets. It was a seemingly ordinary summer’s day, Rory doing something he’d often done. A seemingly safe community, he’d always returned home. Until he didn’t.
Gordon and Sarah wander the beach, search the local streets. There’s no sign of him. The all-too-young police constables sitting at their kitchen table “like kids in fancy dress”, taking down Gordon and Sarah’s story and Rory’s details – name, age, clothing, hair colour, height. “How the Rory-ness of Rory, his bright, laughing, non-stop self, was being flattened into a checklist of features.” The questions the first of so many they’d be asked. And that they’d ask of themselves.
Days pass. Months. The rollercoaster of guilt and fear. Whispers and gossip in the community. How do your neighbours see you now; how do you see yourselves? And when there seem to be no answers, do the faintest hopes keep you going, or slowly kill?
McIlvanney delivers gut-punch storytelling. He soaks readers in people and place, going far beyond “what happened to Rory?”, parlaying a missing persons case into an emotional ride that stands apart from the mysteries, serial killer tales, cosy crimes and ticking-clock thrillers that currently dominate the crime and thriller genre.
His exploration of the human impact of sudden, life-changing acts and the guilt weighing from seemingly innocuous choices is perhaps even more compelling than the page-turning investigations into what happened to Rory, and why.
The Good Father is a quietly terrifying tale that upturns expectations without relying on pyrotechnics, and may be his best work yet.
The Good Father, by Liam McIlvanney (Bonnier, $36.99), is out now.
