"Boy Still Missing"

Finished up John Searles' first novel, "Boy Still Missing." The plot centers around 16 year old Dominick Pindle from Nowheresville, USA whose mother dies in a hotel room during a botched abortion, still illegal during the book's pre-Roe vs. Wade timeframe. Money he has stolen from his mother's emergency stash to help out Edie, his father's mistress, with whom Dominick is infatuated and who is pregnant with his half-sister, turns out the to be an indirect cause of his mother's gruesome death. Without her cache of cash, she can't afford to fly to Mexico to get an abortion done by a doctor, so her lover, the town sheriff, performs the abortion and leaves Dominick's mother to bleed to death when something goes horribly wrong and she starts hemorraghing. Dominick's guilt leads him to seek redemption for his mother's death, leading to a fast-paced finale in which he is holed up with Edie's baby, his infant half-sister who he has kidnapped, in the very motel room where his mother passed away. There are a couple more twists and turns in the story, but the denouement of the parallel plot lines kept me up til the wee hours, eager to get to the the dramatic ending. Was a nice, fast read.