Tall Oaks is Chris Whitaker’s debut novel. It is interesting to observe his progression as a writer from this novel to We Begin at the End and All the Colors of the Dark, but I don’t find Tall Oaks to be a particularly good novel.

Tall Oaks is about a missing three-year-old child named Harry Monroe who was abducted by a person wearing a clown mask. Three months after Harry’s kidnapping there are still no clues as to his whereabouts. Harry’s mother, who is making very questionable life choices to numb her pain over the loss of her son, and the town sheriff are the only people who are still looking for him. The novel is populated with a cast of characters who are behaving oddly, so there are plenty of suspects.

Tall Oaks lacks what Whitaker has done so well in both We Begin at the End and All the Colors of the Dark, and that is character development. There are just too many characters in Tall Oaks and the story jumps rapidly between each character’s subplot that they feel like caricatures and not real people. One of the characters is a seventeen-year-old boy named Manny who, inexplicably, wants to be an Italian mafioso (even though he is not even Italian) who shakes down the local businesses for protection money. Manny is supposed to be the comic relief of the novel, but his subplot isn’t funny. It is the kind of saccharine cringey humour you would see in a cheesy movie or TV show.

The mystery of what happened to Harry was intriguing and had a surprisingly tragic ending considering the lighter tone of the novel. I did not figure it out until right before the big reveal, but that could be because all the stuff going on with the other characters was distracting and not necessarily relevant to the main plot.

It is better that I did not read Tall Oaks first because I probably would not have bothered with Whitaker’s other novels if I had.