City of the Sun by David Levien

The most impressive debut of the year, David Levien's City of the Sun (Bantam, £10), targets every parent's worst nightmare: the vanishing child. When Jamie Gabriel, 12, doesn't return from his paper-round, his family turn to ex-cop Frank Behr. The PI, too, has a burden to bear: the death of his own seven-year-old son. Levien makes you feel the Gabriels' pain and despair. The plot, both clever and convincing, grips from the off.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

Twelve-year-old Jamie Gabriel gets on his bike before dawn to deliver newspapers in his suburban neighbourhood. Somewhere en route, he vanishes without a trace. Fourteen months later, still with no sign of Jamie and having lost all faith in the police, his parents Paul and Carol are on the verge of abandoning hope. Then they meet private investigator Frank Behr, a tough, reclusive ex-cop. Abandoned by his former colleagues, separated from his wife and haunted by his own terrible past, Behr doesn't make it a practice to take on hopeless cases, but the desperate couple's plea for help awakens a personal pain he can't ignore. So begins his unrelenting quest for answers in Jamie's disappearance.