Just Another Missing Person

Just Another Missing Person is Gillian McAllister’s eighth novel, published in 2023 by William Morrow. McAllister achieved widespread popularity with her seventh novel, Wrong Place, Wrong Time, a New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club Pick in 2022. She began her career as a writer while a solicitor, writing on nights and weekends, completing her first book, Everything but the Truth, in 2017. Her books are known for their unrelenting pace, suspense, and imaginative plot twists.

This guide refers to the 2023 William Morrow e-book edition.

Plot Summary

Just Another Missing Person tells the story of Julia Day, a detective with the Portishead police, as she investigates the case of a missing woman, Olivia Johnson. The narrative is told through four points of view: Julia’s, Olivia’s, Lewis’s (the father of another missing woman), and Emma’s (the mother of Lewis’s daughter’s boyfriend).

Julia is out to dinner with her husband, Art, and daughter, Genevieve, when she receives a call from work. A woman named Olivia Johnson is missing, and Julia will oversee the investigation. Arriving at the station, she runs into an informant, Price, and gives him a cup of tea. Looking over the case with her closest friend and second-in-command, Jonathan, she is reminded of a similar case from a year ago in which a young woman named Sadie disappeared. Julia never solved the case and still feels guilty about it.

Later that night, a masked man surprises Julia in her car and blackmails her. A year ago, Julia’s daughter Genevieve cut a mugger’s throat with her keys, and the wound led eventually to his death after medical complications. Julia stole CCTV footage of the incident to protect her daughter. She thought no one knew of it, but the masked man claims to have proof of what happened. In exchange for his silence, he wants her to plant evidence implicating a man named Matthew James in Olivia’s disappearance. Julia complies.

Matthew James lives with his mother, Emma. Sadie was his girlfriend. Although he was quickly cleared by the police in Sadie’s disappearance, Sadie’s father, Lewis, used the media to cast suspicion on him. His mother was his alibi. But when the police connect Matthew to Olivia’s disappearance based on the evidence Julia plants, she begins to doubt him.

The novel next reveals that Olivia is not a real person. After Matthew was cleared of Sadie’s disappearance, Lewis created a fake person named Olivia Johnson, using his job at the passport center to duplicate the passport of a real Olivia Johnson. Lewis then staged her “disappearance.” He is the blackmailer. He is trying to incriminate Matthew because he is still convinced that Matthew is responsible for Sadie’s disappearance.

As Julia seeks to make the case against Matthew, the real Olivia Johnson comes to the station with a passport to prove it. Julia makes the connection between Lewis, who works at the passport office, and the duplicate passport. When she visits him at home, he confesses to staging the disappearance of the fake Olivia. Julia realizes she failed Lewis by not solving Sadie’s disappearance because, at the time, she was preoccupied with protecting Genevieve. Now that Olivia Johnson’s case is closed, she recommits to finding what happened to Sadie.

Meanwhile, Emma finds cryptic evidence in Matthew’s bedroom: a PIN and a scrap of paper with a QR code and the name Prudence Jones. She tracks the PIN to a storage unit in which she finds bloodstained clothing and the passports of Sadie and another woman. She becomes convinced that Matthew is responsible for the disappearances of Sadie and Olivia (she doesn’t know that Olivia’s disappearance was faked) and possibly more women, and she takes her evidence to the police. She tells Julia about locations she tracked on Matthew’s phone, one of which is an out-of-the-way diner.

Julia figures out the mystery, but before she can tell anyone, she is abducted. She texts Lewis the diner’s name, and he goes there alone. Sadie is there. She tells him that she was making passports for people who were to be deported, using his connection to the passport office. Someone found out and pressured her into making bigger batches of fake passports for profit. She tells him the villain was a police officer named Jonathan.

Julia is in the trunk of Jonathan’s car and is sure she will be killed. When he opens the trunk, however, he is shot by her informant, Price, who was worried and followed her. He and Julia arrange Jonathan’s death to look like a suicide. Julia realizes that with her cover-up of Genevieve’s crime hanging over her head, she will always be susceptible to blackmail. She confesses to Genevieve’s crime so her daughter will not go to jail.

A year and a half later, Julia’s trial is about to begin when the prosecutor drops all charges. Julia is stunned, not realizing that Lewis used his same blackmail tactics, with Price’s help, to pressure the prosecutor, who had been covering for Jonathan’s crimes.