Gus and the Missing Boy
by Troy Hunter
Wakefield Press
Angus (Gus) Green is in year 9 and is having a tough time. His father was killed in a car accident five years previously and his mother has been reliant on his help as a result of the injuries she received in the accident.
Gus had always felt out of sync with the world. “Slower, clumsier, sluggishly dragging himself through life like the air is made of tar.” Along with his only friend at school Shell, they are “the fattest kids in the school” and Shell is also trying to deal with her own problems.
Gus has always felt out of place in the world and he is fascinated by true crime, particularly stories about missing people – “what happens to them, and what happens to the families and friends left behind”.
Kane is his other friend as they have lived next door to each other forever. Although Kane is three years older, popular and sporty, they have a lot of interests in common such as being Doctor Who fans … and they are also both gay.
One particular Australian website uses AI to estimate what people would look like five, ten or twenty years after they had gone missing. When Gus comes across Robin Winter who went missing twelve years ago at the age of three, the ‘now’ photo looks eerily like him.
With no photographs on him as a baby and with absolutely no relatives apart from his mother, Gus realises that he doesn’t look like either of his parents. Could it be that he was kidnapped as a child and does that make his parents kidnappers?
Author Troy Hunter was raised by his grandparents and never knowing his father, he was able to relate to Gus’s search for identity and search for family. This Young Adult detective novel is a huge journey of self-discovery.
Lezly Herbert
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