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.
Themes
The Difficulty of Separating the Personal and Professional
Julia is a police officer, but her job is more than a paycheck—it is a vocation intrinsic to her identity. She blurs the boundaries between her personal and professional life because, for her, there is no difference even as she recognizes that “this is not normal behavior” (16). She brings items from home to her office and brings work home, even involving her daughter in her police work. Art is the only character who pushes back against this behavior, but by the end of the novel, even he realizes that Julia can’t distinguish between work and home.
Julia further blurs this boundary by bringing home to the station, or rather, by including it in her definition of home: “It isn’t a warm Nando’s with her kid, but, funnily enough, it is something almost more potent: to Julia, it is home” (11). This is even more true of her office. It doesn’t just feel like home, it looks like home, decorated with items “bought with her own money […] In other words, it’s a room in her house, transplanted to the office” (17). She pays extra for special blinds to be installed: “The entire right-hand wall is windows and beautiful blinds just like at home” (16). The station is comfortable to her. The narrator even mentions that the evidence room, “a large, warm room,” is “her favorite place” (87). Julia’s insistence on creating an atmosphere like her home both emphasizes that the police station is an extension of her home and makes it more difficult for her to establish boundaries between the two.
Julia doesn’t just bring home to work; she brings work home. She routinely reviews case files at night. The narrator says, “There is something authentic, to Julia, about leafing through the pages in bed” (17). Further, she involves both Art and Genevieve. In the first chapter, although Julia is out with her family, she discreetly checks out a man at a nearby table whom she believes she “once charged […] with murder” (7). She asks her husband and daughter to get the man’s license plate number when he leaves, not realizing that she crossed the boundary between work and home. Later, Julia discusses her cases with her daughter, making it clear that Julia has normalized this crossing of boundaries.
Art is the only one who pushes back against Julia for bringing her work into their domestic life. However, by the end of the novel, he, too, understands that “who she is […] what she does, […] are, to Julia, the same thing” (366). Far from solving The Difficulty of Separating the Personal and Professional, Julia reaffirms that they are one and the same and pressures Art to accept that fact.
The Distinction Between Cops and Criminals
Being a police officer is part of Julia’s identity; however, she becomes a criminal. She believes her criminality and corruption begin when the masked man forces her to plant evidence incriminating Matthew. This perspective exposes Julia’s blind spot: She doesn’t recognize that her criminality began a year earlier on the night of Genevieve’s assault. Further, she insists that her corruption is different from that of other police officers.
When the masked man tells her to incriminate Matthew, Julia considers herself unbribable because “she hasn’t ever got into debt. She doesn’t want money or power or drugs. She’s off social media” (43). When she eventually plants the evidence, she sees it as transformative: “Once straight as a rail, Julia, with no choices before her, now metamorphoses, right there in front of the looking glass” (58). Julia doesn’t recognize that her transformation occurred a year earlier, and this second crime is nothing new. It doesn’t occur to her that she committed a crime last year when she covered for Genevieve, and she wouldn’t be corruptible if she hadn’t already committed a crime.
Although Julia doesn’t see herself as corrupt until she plants evidence, the reason the blackmailer has leverage is that she already used her position as a police officer to commit a crime. The narrator says that, after calling the ambulance for Zac, Julia “broke into the CCTV cupboard and removed it, took it home and corrupted the footage” (46). She covers up Genevieve’s injuring of Zac but doesn’t see her actions as criminal until the masked man uses them against her. As Olivia’s disappearance becomes more complex, Julia’s criminality goes further—she not only continues to cover up her and Genevieve’s crimes from the previous year, but she also covers up the planting of evidence against Matthew, again using her status as a police officer to do so. She even involves Price, blackmailing him the same way the masked man did her.
When Julia arrests Matthew based on the DNA evidence that she planted, she attempts to force a confession from him. She seeks “a place to talk to Matthew with no cameras or recording equipment, as so very many corrupt police officers before her have required” (254). However, even then she rejects the idea that she is the same as other corrupt cops, claiming, “But this isn’t that, […] this is a mess” (254). She doesn’t recognize this as the same line of thinking that many corrupt officials no doubt engage in. She believes that “the decision to descend downward into the criminal world was actually made the night […] the man got into her car and forced her into corruption” (178). Julia’s refusal to recognize that her corruption began when she covered up of Genevieve’s crime and her belief that she is different from other corrupt cops raise the possibility that Julia’s commitment to The Sacrifices of Parenthood render her unfit for policework.
The Sacrifices of Parenthood
Parenthood in Just Another Missing Person is often about the sacrifice not just of freedom and time but also of one’s ethics and relationships, even the relationship with the child. By telling the story from the perspective of three parents (Julia, Lewis, and Emma), Gillian McAllister highlights the importance of parental relationships in the novel. Each of these parents makes sacrifices for their children; Julia and Lewis sacrifice their ethics while Emma sacrifices her son’s trust.
Julia sacrifices her professional ethics, and very nearly her career, for Genevieve. The narrator says, “At every turn of her life, she’s tried to do what a good mother and a good police officer would do—hasn’t she? But today, the two compete” (67). A year after she covered up Genevieve’s crime, she still thinks, “She’d do it again […] She had no choice. Nobody takes risks with things that are too precious to them” (69). At the end of the novel, she is still willing to sacrifice her freedom for her daughter. Even though Genevieve doesn’t want her to, Julia confesses to her daughter’s crime, taking the blame and possible punishment so that Genevieve will remain free.
Lewis sacrifices his ethics as well, and nearly sacrifices his marriage, to gain what he perceives as justice for his daughter. To hold Sadie’s boyfriend accountable for her disappearance, he commits identity theft, blackmails Julia, and frames Matthew for murder. Yolanda understands his dogged pursuit, telling him, “You felt that if you could prove Andrew [i.e., Matthew] had done it, we might be able to get her back” (300). He is motivated by his need to find the truth but also by grief and his sense that he failed to protect his daughter and failed in his duties as a parent.
Emma sacrifices her son’s trust and her sense of herself as a good parent to seek the truth about Matthew. She worries that, as a single mother, she somehow failed as a parent and is willing to sacrifice her relationship with Matthew to find the truth. She faces her own accountability for Matthew’s actions, thinking, “I must have been doing it wrong all these years. Cutting you too much slack. Not demanding enough from you. Giving you always the benefit of the fucking doubt” (322). The relief when she finds out the truth is two-fold. She is relieved to know that Matthew is a good person, willing to appear guilty to protect Sadie. She is also relieved that she raised a good person, validating her work as a mother. By exploring the responsibilities and sacrifices of parenthood from these three perspectives, McAllister deepens the thematic meaning of her novel, layering complex questions about parenting into the novel’s mystery.
