Book Report: We Disappear

We Disappear
By Scott Heim

From Back:
The body of a teenage boy is discovered in a Kansas field. The murder haunts Donna--a recent widow battling cancer--calling forth troubling details from long-suppressed memories of her past. Hoping to discover more about 'disappeared' people, she turns to her son, Scott, who is fighting demons of his own. Addicted to methamphetamines and sleeping pills, Scott is barely holding on--though the chance to help his mother in her strange and desperate search holds out a slim promise of some small salvation.
But what he finds is a boy named Otis handcuffed in a secret basement room, and the questions that arise seem too disturbing even to contemplate. With his mother's health rapidly deteriorating, he must surrender to his own obsession, and unravel Otis's unsettling connections to other missing teens... and ultimately, to Scott himself.

First Paragraph:
The little girls who found the body of the missing boy were not angels, although that is how the newspaper described them, the following morning, beneath the headline. I saw the photo, after all, and the seven girls were only girls. They had no heavenly warmth or sweet, scarless faces kissed individually by God. What the girls did have were muddy pant-legs and boots; bright jackets buttoned against the wind of a Sunday hiking trip; name tags in crooked calligraphy made just that morning by their Lutheran youth-group sponsor. Teresa and Joy, Maura Kay, Mary Anne. Two Jennifers and a Missy. When I close my eyes, I picture the girls stepping back, a warped semicircle, as the body of the murdered boy, his bones and tattered flannels, alters their lives forever. Their hands folded clumsily for prayer. Their seven mouths a silent chorous of ohs.