Sibling Divisions
Even though the members of the Delaney clan all share a talent for tennis played at high levels, it is not really sibling rivalry per se that is explored thematically. As with any gang of four making up the offspring of marriage, there is that, of course, but what is examined in closer detail is the natural ways that brothers and sisters will align into different groups when some sort of division occurs among the parents. Often this take the form of divorce, but something more sinister is at play in this story story: their mother had gone missing and the police have fingered their dad as the most likely suspect behind the mysterious disappearance. The four kids eventually become two groups of two: those who are pretty sure their dad is guilty and those who think something more complicated than the mind of trained law enforcement officers can understand is in play. It is a partially a reflection of something most kids and parents don’t like to admit openly: kids have a favorite parent and parents have a favorite kid.
No Marriage is What it Seems
A recurring theme to be found throughout the author’s entire body of work published for adult readers is that marriages are never what they seem to be from the outside looking in. This applies both ways: bad marriages are often less dysfunctional than they appear while good marriages are never even close to being perfect. From the outside—even the immediate outside of the kids—the marriage of Stan and Joy Delaney looks way more solid than most if not necessarily without problems. It only in the light of those problems coming to light that the kids split up into those buying the limited perspective cops bring to any domestic situation.
American Law Enforcement Is Inept
Almost from the first minute, the cops identify a crime that hasn’t taken place and finger Stan as the guilty party. The only real motivation they have to pursue an investigation against Stan is that when wives go missing the husband almost always is behind it. That is obviously not true, of course, but because police have seen it turn out to be true enough time—with all the multiple other times often being a case of never being able to solve the crime at all—that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy based on the line of thinking if a crime has been solved in the past, it must be applicable in every future instance. That law enforcement in America is not merely systemically incompetent, but that this ineptitude springs from laziness is explored through the fact that the cops here do not even expend the effort to determine that no crime has even been committed and an alternative explanation for Joy’s disappearance might be a more worthwhile pursuit. Statistics that some husbands have actually been responsible for their wife going missing, however, is a much easier track to take the wide-open alternative that would require actual imaginative reasoning skills.
