52 pages • 1 hour read
Gillian McAllisterJust Another Missing Person
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Julia Day
Julia, the protagonist, is a detective chief inspector with the Portishead police. Lewis describes her with the phrase, “Slight, blond, intelligent eyes” (95). She is known for her relentlessness and attention to detail—so much so that her friend and colleague Erin notices the difference in her behavior during Olivia’s case and becomes suspicious.
Julia’s career is a fundamental aspect of her identity. It also gives her the power to embark on criminal enterprises: planting evidence, erasing CCTV footage, and covering up for her daughter Genevieve. The narrator says that as much as Julia loves her job, “she doesn’t regret doing what she did” for Genevieve (25). Although Julia identifies herself as a detective, she sacrifices her professional integrity, and possibly her career, for Genevieve. Willingness to give up a profession that is part of her identity is one of The Sacrifices of Parenthood.
Julia’s work and home lives often blur. She brings her work home at night and even shares it with her daughter. She also brings her home life into work, decorating her office with items from home and installing the same blinds she has at home. The Difficulty of Separating the Personal and Professional comes to a head when her professional ethics and personal allegiances conflict after she covers up Genevieve’s crime. Julia admits to sacrificing the quality of the investigation into Sadie’s disappearance for her effort to protect Genevieve. However, she also sacrifices her personal life, specifically her marriage, for her professional life. She recognizes the cost later in the novel when she admits that she is partly responsible for Art’s infidelity. At the beginning of the novel, she fully blamed him.
When she is blackmailed, Julia struggles to reconcile her personal loyalty and professional duty even as she fails to recognize that she already violated her duty when she covered up Genevieve’s crime. She worries about becoming a criminal but doesn’t recognize that she already is one. Throughout the novel, Julia’s actions call into question The Distinction Between Cops and Criminals.
Lewis Owen
Lewis is the father of Sadie, the girl whose disappearance Julia failed to solve a year before the novel starts. Julia describes him as “forty-something, rangy, tall, possessing a kind of wired charisma usually seen only in celebrities or sportspeople” (248). Lewis is single-minded in his pursuit of Sadie’s boyfriend, Matthew, as the guilty party in his daughter’s disappearance. Creating Olivia’s identity and blackmailing Julia show how far he will go to punish Matthew. Like Julia and Emma, Lewis illustrates The Sacrifices of Parenthood as he breaks the law and risks his marriage to punish the man he believes hurt is daughter.
His limited perspective and focus on Matthew hinder his pursuit of the truth. They also render him an unreliable narrator, a fact that the novel emphasizes through Yolanda’s quiet, persistent rebuttals of his versions of events. Although he is single-minded, he also recognizes that Yolanda, whom the narrator refers to as “the level-headed love of [his] life” (33), balances him.
Although Lewis is flawed, he holds out hope that Sadie is alive long after Yolanda gives up. This hope eventually leads to his reunion with Sadie. Lewis’s persistence pays off. By the end of the novel, when Lewis convinces Price to blackmail Patricia, he has learned the value of violating the law and morality when he deems it necessary.
Emma Zamos
Emma is Matthew’s mother. She raised him alone and doubts her abilities as a mother. She also doubts Matthew’s character. Emma is driven by shame over what she perceives as her shortcomings as a mother. She hides from the world for a year between Sadie’s and Olivia’s disappearances.
Although he is cleared in Sadie’s investigation, Matthew remains the focus of newspaper stories and Lewis’s suspicions. Emma quits her job and moves them to a new part of town. She protects her son, but when her suspicions are raised, she digs for the truth even when it means betraying his trust. Emma contributes to the theme of The Sacrifices of Parenthood in a different way than Lewis and Julia. When she becomes convinced of Matthew’s guilt, she goes to the police even though it might mean he will be jailed and she will be exposed as a poor parent. Emma’s love for her son is all-consuming, yet she is willing to risk his freedom to discover the truth. She shows herself to be a skilled and dogged investigator, uncovering many of the clues that lead Julia to the truth.
Genevieve Day
Genevieve, Julia’s daughter is 15 years old and, as Julia notes, “everything has always come easily” (46). Her confidence leads her to fight back against her mugger rather than “drop her belongings and run” as Julia would have told her to (46). She is also newly fascinated with Julia’s job: “Previously ambivalent, Genevieve is now positively obsessed with what she calls true crime and what Julia calls her job” (16). Julia realizes later that this preoccupation is rooted in her daughter’s guilt over Zac’s death. Genevieve ponders what makes her different from the criminals that Julia pursues, a question that Julia never asks herself. Genevieve is more thoughtful and insightful than her mother about her crime and its aftermath.
Genevieve’s character arc explores issues of guilt and freedom. Unlike Julia, who believes that prison would be the worst outcome for Genevieve, her daughter isn’t sure, questioning whether she would now be in jail if they didn’t cover up the crime. She sees confessing as a path to freedom, and although Julia focuses on keeping Genevieve out of prison, her daughter seeks a different type of freedom that can only be gained through confession and atonement.
Matthew James/Andrew Zamos
Matthew, like Julia, is involved in the storylines of both Sadie and Olivia. He is central in both investigations despite having alibis for both disappearances. Matthew shows himself to be steadfast, loyal, and principled. Faced with continuing harassment by Lewis and the newspapers, he keeps Sadie’s secret, even as he is forced to move and change his name. He keeps her secret even in the face of imprisonment and shows concern for Julia despite her treatment of him.
Matthew is the most principled character in the novel, and he is baffled by the moral compromises of those around him. Even though he knows that the villain is a police officer, he accommodates their DNA swabs and follows Julia when she illegally takes him out of his jail cell to intimidate him. At the end of the novel, he shows strength of character as he visits Lewis and Yolanda’s home even though Lewis was the architect of his misery over the past year.
Jonathan
Jonathan is Julia’s closest friend and her right-hand man in the police department. He is a new father, and many of his interactions with Julia revolve around their children—watching him raise a newborn reminds Julia of her motherhood. Julia describes Jonathan as “a details person, somebody who always, always, always took the work home with them, emotionally or physically” (13). This assessment is truer than Julia knows. Jonathan is the novel’s antagonist and used his authority to take advantage of the system in a variety of ways. He also, the narrator says, “specializes in the detailed machinations of the way the youth live their lives online” (19), a skill that contributes to his success as a criminal. Julia describes him as a “control freak,” and “just like Julia in this respect” (81). Julia’s inability to see that Jonathan is a criminal until it is too late is partly the result of her close relationship with him, which makes it difficult for her to assess him objectively.
