After Etan: The Missing Child Case That Held America Captive

Last summer, I reviewed Robin Sax's book, Predators and Child Molesters: What Every Parent Needs to Know to Keep Kids SAFE. After seeing that review, another author, Lisa R. Cohen, contacted me about her own book, After Etan: The Missing Child Case that Held America Captive. I am really not interested in developing a specialty in this genre, but Cohen's email intrigued me enough that I agreed to read her book too.

Her publisher sent me a copy, which then sat untouched for several months because--as was the case with Sax's book--I couldn't bring myself to start it. Why would I voluntarily want to read about this poor child, Etan Patz, who disappeared in 1979? And his parents, who have lived with uncertainty and grief ever since?

In the end, the story was too compelling for me to ignore. I wanted to know what had happened, and how the Patzes found the strength to continue breathing after their nightmare stretched from minutes to days to years in length. Cohen explains it all in this book, and once I started reading, I was captivated just like so many who have followed or been involved in this case over the past three decades.

Cohen was a TV producer in the early 1990s when she first started researching this case. She later spent several years tracking down its many complicated details and turning them into this book. It takes all 367 pages Cohen has to explain the story of Etan's alleged killer and how he was (kind of, sort of) brought to justice. The book has plenty of substance, if not a lot of style; it reads more like a newspaper article than a true-crime novel, but I appreciated the lack of breathlessness and exaggeration.

One surprise is that the heroes here are not only Stan and Julie Patz, Etan's parents, but also law enforcement officials like prosecutor Stu GraBois and FBI agent Mary Galligan. In fact, for large sections of the book, the Patz family moves to the sidelines as the narrative focuses on the hunt for Etan's suspected killer, and the creative legal efforts GraBois undertakes to mete out justice. My knowledge of and admiration for all of these people, and for the positive changes they have created, will stay with me far longer than my disgust for the killer. And that is the true beauty of this book.

Mayberry Mom will not be reading any more books about kids in jeopardy for quite some time, OK?

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