The Missing by Andrew O'Hagan

In March 1993, two-year-old James Bulger was abducted from a mall in England and murdered by two ten-year-old children. The case touched off a storm of comment in the press, but it was Andrew O'Hagan's eloquent and disarming piece in The Londong Review of Books that captured the public's imagination. In The Missing, the book that grew out of that essay, O'Hagan offers a fascinating meditation on missing persons.