Absence

Books

In this moving, richly detailed speculative crime debut, the world is unraveling from an epidemic of human vanishing. Two novice investigators are dispatched to small-town Kansas to interview a woman who claims to have returned from Absence, offering answers to everything. People are "popping," disappearing one-by-one, into thin air: an ongoing global cataclysm known as Spontaneous Human Absence. In a world where prospects for survival are increasingly grim, hopelessness prevails, political rifts widen, and doomsday predictions flourish. Harvey Ellis works the night shift for the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs, an ad hoc federal agency meant to contain and catalogue the crisis. His job: to investigate claims of Absence, and, if validated, issue a standard government stipend to boost morale. Still recovering from losses of his own, Harvey is content in his routine-until his life is shaken up by an unexpected assignment from the central office. A woman long thought Absent has reappeared in her hometown of ...