Book review: The Child Finder, by Rene Denfeld

As a new resident of Austin, I was excited to volunteer for my first Texas Book Festival. In an article I wrote last month about the festival, I'd described my role as an author's guide, and how I'd had the good fortune to meet a number of very interesting people, one of whom was best-selling author, journalist and private eye Rene Denfeld.

Denfeld had made a strong impression on me of someone with integrity, and with a huge measure of compassion for all of her fellow humans, not just the ones lucky enough to be born in her own country (the United States). What little she divulged of her personal life during the 45 minutes I heard her speak was enough to make me an instant fan, and soon after went looking for what books of hers I might find on the shelves of Austin's new downtown library.• The first one I was able to get my hands on was her "novel" published by Harper Collins in 2017, The Child Finder. I put quotes around the word novel because from the little bit I gleaned from what Denfeld told her audience about herself that day, and from my reading of this book, I got the strong impression that she was often writing about herself and her own experiences.

A word of warning, however. While Denfeld does not go into very graphic detail about the awful things that humans sometimes do to each other, this is also no book for the faint-hearted. The respect she shows actual people in talking about what's happened to them she also affords the characters she creates. I think it must be a respect for the reader as well, coupled with an understanding that a story can be true even though the author may not carry its truths to nauseating extremes. I wonder if this distinction is similar to that one could make between Hitchcock's 1960 classic thriller Psycho, and practically any horror flick made in the decades to come, the ones that leave nothing to the imagination.

The child-finder of the title is, like the author herself, a private investigator who spends practically all of her time trying to find children who have disappeared, although most of the book revolved around a single case she has been called in to help solve. Sometimes she finds them still alive, even after months, or years have passed. Sometimes she discovers that a child was accidentally left somewhere, and one's heart goes out to the poor and overworked single mom who falls asleep on a bus one day, her toddler in a stroller nearby, and the mysterious case of what happened to the child that Denfeld would eventually be brought in to solve.


















Sometimes the cases she sometimes briefly refers to involve spouses who kidnap children lost in a custody dispute; sometimes the most outlandish-seeming events transpire that make you think: only in a novel. But then again, if you've lived long enough, and seen and read enough of what goes on in our world, you know in your heart of hearts: oh yes. Someone could do that, to another human being, even to a child.

Don't let any of this deter you from finding and reading this book. I will admit that, although childless myself, I wept at certain sections. Denfeld is a fine writer, and you may very well zip through her book in a couple of sittings, as I did. Difficult as certain parts were to get through, the patient reader will be richly rewarded with a renewed faith in the goodness of people like her, who as a girl went through her own version of abuse at the hands of a family member: it's people like her, she writes, who will save the world: "those who have walked the side of sorrow and seen the dawn."

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• ~ An article about this amazing building is forthcoming, which - have you heard?! - last year won an award for Best New Library in the World.