There is little gentleness in [Rosa Guy's] Harlem. Within a few lines [of The Disappearance], we are stumbling among empty wine bottles and cockroaches with Imamu, a sixteen year old black Muslim recently returned from a detention centre and looking for his mother, an alcoholic widowed by Vietnam. Imamu has been offered the chance of better things with the Aimley family in Brooklyn…. [The] plot becomes a skilfully told, absorbing thriller as Imamu is suspected of being implicated in the disappearance of the Aimleys' young daughter. Only 10 years ago, Leon Garfield could say to an approving audience that a children's book must end optimistically—here, the first glimpse of the lost child is of a decomposing first, "stretching up out of the shallow grave" under fresh concrete in the murderer's basement. A harsh, relentless and exciting tale of the streets, whose truth to life I am unable to...