Title: Love and Injustice
Author: Mary Crawford
Date: 2018
Publisher: Diversity Ink
ISBN: 978-1-945637-27-8
Quote: "I know you don't believe me--but DeAndre was completely freaked out when Tallulah Johnson went missing."
Of three brothers, the military serviceman on active duty overseas, the police officer, and the schoolboy, their mother never would have dreamed that the youngest would become a Missing Person first...but that's what DeAndre just did. Luckily for him, his big brother's favorite person, who has just lost her job because of nasty things she didn't do, has time to work with big brother Dashonte's other friends to confirm a link between the disappearances of DeAndre, Tallulah, and a busload of other gifted students who've all disappeared separately. Most of them didn't know each other before, but several do now.
Trigger warnings: quick, tasteful, police-report-type references to several appalling things that have actually happened to missing children.
If this non-police reader can find a flaw in this police-procedural mystery (no real murders, but someone who was ill is found dead), it's the characterization of a baddie. A few years ago, writing a short story that was really about Optacons and stun belts, I had a blind character with a future super-Optacon (and a supportive family) rescue a child from the custody of a "Mr. Badman" who I thought wasn't worth characterizing, so I just had him advocate a laundry list of things my regular readers and I don't like. The story didn't mention whether the NFL still existed in its hypothetical future, but if the NFL had existed you know Mr. Badman would've liked the Cowboys, too! I now think that was an amateurish way to construct a character, even one whose function is to die and never be missed. And I suspect it's the way Tori's enemy has been characterized in this novel.
What I didn't like, while reading this book, is nothing about the book. It's the way Mary Crawford accurately describes the way the state's bureaucratic system always adds to the misery of people it's trying to "help"--at least, if those people are introverts, and probably even if they're not. It's the bulk and clumsiness of the bureaucracy. Everything has to follow a uniform policy. Every person has to be "processed" past a "team" of professional "helpers" who know nothing about the individuals being processed, "so that they can be objective"--bosh. Humans are not an objective lifeform. That's why every introvert above age five knows, the first time each of those strangers' eyeballs bore into our faces, that we;re Not Among Possible Friends. Introverts put up with a lot, and take personal vengeance for what we can't put up with, when the alternative is being processed. Like Tori in the story, not to mention the missing children, we may be completely innocent and virtuous victims of completely vile and unsupportable evildoers, but we need encouragement, hand-holding, and positive rewards every single step of the way to endure the process.
I think back to the summer I reported a petty criminal, a "flasher," to the police in the town where I was attending church college. I always wondered why I bothered. It wasn't the neighborhood's first "flasher," or even mine; it was the time I happened to have been "flashed" when I had a couple of hours to spare. I thought a couple of hours was a reasonable amount of time to donate to the cause of public safety. During the rest of the year I was called back, and asked to repeat the same story, four or five times to different police officers. I understood that that's one way to identify false witnesses. I also understood that it's a very effective way to protect criminals. I reported something that made me angry; I could easily imagine how the system would protect criminals who'd done things that made people afraid, or ashamed, or sick, or physically injured. I think we could use a law stating that the bureaucracy is entitled to one interview with a person who is not guilty of a crime, after which anyone who wants to repeat or even clarify any question the person has already answered may ask the person's permission to do so in exchange for $100 in cash. If comparing the way the person describes something on different days is all that valuable, the person should get something valuable from it too!
In this novel the missing children all met online, and agreed to meet offline, and walked into dangerous situations, with people (Mr. Badman had help) who wouldn't have been much more obvious if they'd had "MR. STRANGER DANGER" painted on their faces. Why? Consider the consequences, from a child's point of view, of reporting that someone in an online community, game, chat, is behaving like Mr. Stranger Danger. For a start you have to report to an adult whose immediate response is likely to be "Well, don't ever visit your favorite community, game, or chat, any more!" Then you get to tell the story, and as a child you already know that most adults who listen to what children are listening in order to tell the children how and why they're obviously in the wrong, rather than doing anything about what the children tell them. Probably you get tighter surveillance, less privacy than you already had, which as a child wasn't much. Then you might even get to tell the same story all over again to people trying to trip you up--"You say he said his name was Don? Are you sure it wasn't Jon?" Meanwhile you don't know that he's not coming after you, bent on revenge. If anything at all happens to the dog or the baby you'll be swearing to God, privately, that you'll never "tattle" on anyone again, even if they are acting exactly like Mr. Stranger Danger.
That's the way our world is and, if anything, Crawford minimizes the ways bureaucracy hurts people because part of the purpose of this story is to cast people in the law and law enforcement professions in a favorable light. All the police people and all but one of the lawyers in this book are wonderful human beings What happens to children, and other victims of crime, when they meet the minority in every group who are not nice people at all, is a whole separate problem this book does not discuss.
Anyway, although its subject matter is feel-bad, on the whole Love and Injustice qualifies as a feel-good story. All the children will be found. Most will recover. Tori will get her job back, Cody and Dashonte will solve the case, and Tori and Cody seem to be set up to live happily ever after--even though this is the beginning of a series about them.
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