NOT LONG AGO PERSONS FOUND

Fighting for the innocent might put you on the right side, but it doesn’t mean you’ll be safe.

When the mutilated body of a 7-year-old boy is found in the river of a big city, pollen and other debris on the corpse suggest he comes from a valley far away in a neighboring country. In Osborn’s unsettling debut, a biological anthropologist and her husband—who acts as her forensic team’s assistant, translator, and our narrator—get sent south by their agency to collect plant and mineral samples to confirm the boy’s identity. Their efforts overlap with the gruesome discovery of a mass grave, and the couple’s attempt to go home with the samples gets blocked by the country’s new regime. Why do they care about the child? Who is in the mass grave? Are these deaths somehow related? Osborn keeps a tight leash on the action as the couple seeks answers. They encounter a host of menacing characters in an unnamed country with a violent history that local officials dismiss. (“That is all in the past. It is over. That does not happen in the present time.…We are progressive!”) Conversations and the narrator’s commentary are restrained and opaque, often to a frustrating degree. “What’s happening to us?” the anthropologist demands of someone helping them. “Oh, you’ll need to find that out for yourselves” is all he’ll say. It’s clear Osborn wants readers to feel the same way while the couple searches for the murderer and possible motives. That search involves jungle treks, interrogation rooms, government double talk, and absurd bureaucratic dead ends worthy of Beckett or Kafka. All of this makes the pair burn for justice and feel “increasingly angry, against [their] instincts for self-preservation.” They resist the sensational conclusions of the authorities, locals, and even their superiors that the child was a victim of some strange ritual. Though the body’s dismemberment and objects found among the boy’s things seem to support that theory, the couple insists there’s a more sinister explanation. That insistence might put at risk their jobs, their relationship, and even their lives, but what haunts them more is the thought of giving up: “What are we if we let this go?” That’s a question neither wants to answer in this harrowing, tautly plotted story.

A tense, claustrophobic detective tale about the toll exacted on people trying to uncover the truth.