"The Disappearance," Rosa Guy's fourth novel, is a compelling and suspenseful story. The reader is immediately captured by the characters, who are so sharply defined, so clearly who they are. Dora Belle could only by a quirky, middle-aged West Indian and only Ann Aimsley, as Guy draws her, could be the queen of her dust-free, plastic-covered home. It is as if Guy excised whole chunks of life and brought her characters up whole. Juxtaposing characters and details of their lives, Guy outlines a picture. She paints a picture of images built up and arduously maintained to mask those common human frailties—fear, loneliness and insecurity—which touch people wherever they live. And so we see those frailties as they move an Ann Aimsley in Brooklyn or Imamu's mother in Harlem and set off events that march steadily toward tragedy.

And it is tragedy and victims that we find...