They are a group of misfits who go online for fun. Their hobby is giving names to the missing dead. But a killer is online with them, and his game is in deadly earnest . . .

Shaun Ryan’s brother, Teddy, died in 1989. Only he didn’t. Looking through his grievously ill mother’s personal effects, Shaun finds a postcard that Teddy posted from New York, dated October 22nd 1990. And in his mother’s family Bible is a picture of an adult Teddy. Could Teddy somehow be alive? And how do you find someone who has never been declared missing and who vanished nearly thirty years ago?

Missing-linc.com are an oddball assortment of geeks and obsessives whose macabre hobby is matching unidentified bodies with missing people. Ellie Caines’ first and biggest case was The Boy in the Dress, a corpse found not ten miles from where she lived in Minnesota, two years after Teddy’s postcard. Her obsession nearly broke her marriage and she left the group – but when the Ryan’s enquiry is passed onto her she knows they have likely matched the missing Teddy with that decades-old corpse. And that she will be sucked back into the old nightmare, where the dead are more real than the living.

I enjoyed the book quite a lot but what took away from the fun was the feeling that Bobbie Cowell’s identity as the serial killer shouldn’t have been revealed so early on. It’s a good murder/mystery book and the format (chat messages, threads, announcements) plus each voice having a different personality – really worked.

The premise is simple – a body is found ages ago but was never identified so it ended up on a website where people (for fun) like to find out who they were in real life. It all gains motion when an Irish nephew posts a note saying that he’s looking for his uncle who went to NY 20 years ago and attaches a picture. Immediately the mods recognise the face as belonging to a case of theirs – The boy in the dress – a potentially gay guy found murdered all while dressed in a pink prom dress.

We have a few interesting characters – Chris, the site owner who is a wheelchair user. She’s smart and determined and much of a loner. Then we have Shaun, the nephew – he’s small and timid and very much broke. His family is huge and filled with secrets – back in the 90s being gay was frowned upon but the reason his uncle got sent away was not because of his sexual inclinations but because of alleged tampering with a minor. He was declared dead by the family and they even made a burial plot for him. He wasn’t dead (yet), he just went to NY to start fresh.

I loved how some of the Irish slang comes out sometimes:

Shaun wasn’t surprised. Terry didn’t like the look of anyone–Shaun included. He was always screwing his mouth into a disapproving cat’s arse whenever they ran into each other. Could it have been Brendan? Doubtful. Brendan was paranoid about anyone spotting them together and only communicated by text message. ‘There was something rough about him,’ Terry continued

When Chris contacts Shaun about his possible dead uncle, she treads with caution.

Now she was sounding like some dead-eyed grief counsellor. He wouldn’t want to hear that hope could keep you going, but it also brought you to your knees.

She was burned before when mis-identification happened and also when Rainbowbrite posted someone’s (alleged) murderer’s name on the site. People became a mob and the poor guy committed suicide following the backlash. And he was innocent.

‘You got it. Once the narrative’s out there and people run with it, it’s like shit on a blanket. And the rumour started on the site. My site. When I got back, it was too late. Kicked the mod off, thought about shutting it down.’

And then we have Bobby Cowell (or Pete) who killed the boy in the dress and then dumped his body unceremoniously in the woods. The dress being one of his other victim’s (Jenniffer) whose body has not yet been found. He joins the missing-linc site and is posing as a retired NY detective and offers his help to the crew, all the while reading all the speculation about the killer (his) psychological profile.

He knew the profilers would slither out of the woodwork sooner or later. Part of him had been looking forward to that, wanted to see how wrong they were. Whoever had written it had peppered it with buzzwords straight out of Criminal Minds: ‘latent urges’, ‘unsub’, ‘signature’, blah blah. Probably an armchair wannabe; Pete could sniff out a fellow fake at a hundred paces. Still, it was getting a lot of traction. He made himself comfortable, began to read: ‘… the unsub is white, early thirties, blue collar, familiar with the area.’ As Tasha would say, duh. He read on: the killer had ‘latent homosexual urges of which he was ashamed’–wrong, nice try–and apparently the ‘way the body was positioned and clothed’ pointed to an attempt at ‘undoing’ the crime. This was ‘a sign, possibly, of remorse. A sign that the unsub knew the victim personally.’ Undoing. Wrong again. The scene wasn’t staged. Down, down, and then: ‘… the unsub is a “soft shouldered guy” who wanted to be the wearer of the dress.’ Right about the soft-shouldered comment–back then, not so much now–but wrong about the dress.
The killer wanted to be the wearer of the dress.

What makes Bobby unique is that he’s nondescript. A person you could pass on the street and not look back again. A Joe. He’s also hiding in plain sight, targetting rich women and ensuring he works out so as to be passable as a husband and possible step-father. He connects with the daughter of the latest conquest while trying to buy time in the fertility race with his new wife. They were both trying to get pregnant and in the end they do IVF. I think if it wasn’t for the IVF succeeding, it would have never come to light that he is the killer.

Turns out that his stepdaughter, annoyed / angry at finding out she has a new sibling on the way, ends up messaging RainbowBrite and telling her BobbieCowell’s real name which matches one of the yearbook collected from Jennifer’s mother. The crew puts two and two together and realise that BobbieCowell was actually Jenifer’s killer, that her dress was used to dress up his second kill, Shaun’s uncle.

Knowing he was found out, BobbieCowell kidnaps and then releases Shaun when he realises that Shaun is nothing like his uncle, doesn’t have the same spark or “je ne sais quoi” which made bobbie kill him in the first place.

‘There were like, hundreds when the Boy in the Dress died, but not so many any more.’
‘Lots of theories about that.’ He’d made it his business to delve into this subject a few years ago for obvious reasons. He didn’t conform to the usual trajectory: bed-wetting, animal torture, setting fires, peeping, exposure, sexual assault. Then murder. That wasn’t him. So what was he? An outlier.
‘Like what?’
‘Could be that potentially violent misogynists–that’s women-haters–have a new outlet now, thanks to the Internet.’

The ending is anticlimactic with the newly identified killer admitting to killing Jennifer as well, and posting where her body could be found and then threatening a hooker with an empty revolver and getting himself killed in the process.

I liked the book but as I said, would have worked better with BobbieCowell’s identity as the killer being kept a secret for longer. All in all, the book is good, deals with themes such as grief, closure, gay identity, media frenzy around killers and a cat-and-mouse game between the good and the bad.