I've enjoyed White's Alan Gregory novels over the years, though the quality has varied; he has some habits that are sometimes annoying.
In this book, the disappearance of a female hiker years ago in the Grand Canyon is the spine that drives this story, as that foundation leads Gregory into a search for the surrogate mother of his ex-wife's baby, one she's having with her fiance, who was ALSO in the Grand Canyon on that fateful day.
In many ways this is an attempt at modern noir, along the lines of "Out of the Past", but that's also one of its failings. In the noir genre, the central character is involved because of decisions he's made or actions he's taken in the past that are now catching up to him. But that's one of the failings of the book: Gregory is virtually a mere bystander or observer as the actions unfold. A character will tell him something, which he passes on to a different character; that character will act on the information, and in turn pass that on to Gregory, who then gets his buddy Sam to take some action; Sam then reports back to Gregory, who then tells another character..... well, you get the picture. Gregory is basically a traffic cop directing the flow of information and actions of OTHER characters as the story unfolds; he doesn't do much of anything himself. Further, there were so many characters being juggled around third-hand, that it was hard to keep them straight. You need a scorecard. There's one major character from the Grand Canyon segment who doesn't even ever really appear in the story except as a dead body -- which we never even "see"!
To be quite honest, the soap-opera timbre of Gregory's marriage and his relationship issues with his wife are also becoming very tedious, and yet again nothing is resolved in this book. How long is White going to drag this out? Gregory is, frankly, a wuss in addressing issues with his wife, very annoyingly passive-aggressive. As a shrink himself, I wonder if White is even aware of this unattractive aspect of Gregory's character? Is Gregory an alter-ego reflecting White's OWN passive-aggressive nature? Interesting to ponder, but the bottom line is it's very monotonous and irritating.
I also have to say that for a major house like Dutton, in publishing one of their upper-tier authors, this book sure had a lot of typographical and grammatical errors: misspelled or entirely missing words, missing or incorrect puntuation, and others. Surprising and distracting.
It did hold some interest, and the flashback scenes to the Grand Canyon were interesting and well done. The solution to the mystery was certainly surprising in that again, there was no real foundation laid for the denouement. That enhanced the surprise, at the expense of believability and the satisfaction quotient.
Like I said; a mixed bag. Three stars.