Mysterious payment made to missing mom leads to tense father-daughter reunion

The twisted and troubled relationship between the charming but irresponsible father John Dixon (Dix) and his adult daughter Lila lies at the heart of Justin Halpern’s comedic novel.

Halpern, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Sh*t My Dad Says, is executive producer and co-showrunner of the Emmy award-winning TV series Abbott Elementary. His literary flair for snappy dialogue and sharp humour is evident in his debut novel, Get Lost.

Dix is one of those men who, despite having a messy personal life, including a jail stint, manages to remain charismatic and overwhelmingly positive. Once a promising semi-professional baseball player, Dix’s bad decisions have left him destitute and stuck back in his dusty hometown of Los Armarios, Calif. He’s been estranged from Lila for years, but the two reunite when Lila returns to town to look for her missing mother, Mattie.

After reaching Los Armarios, Lila’s first stop is the town’s jail, where her father is being held on suspicion of killing Mattie. Lila finds the suspect at the centre of a group of laughing police officers as Dix regales them with jokes and stories.

Lila is convinced her mother isn’t dead, since Mattie has a long history of suddenly disappearing for a few days. This vanishing act dates back to Lila’s childhood when her mother would tuck a note and money inside a ceramic lighthouse before leaving her young daughter on her own. Lila was forced to become self-reliant, a quality that helped her survive her teen years spent in various foster homes.

It’s not Mattie’s disappearance that worries Lila, but rather her discovery that Mattie received a bank transfer of $250,000 shortly before she left. Security video footage taken at Mattie’s apartment complex shows her entering her apartment yet never leaving before the local sheriff checks on her two days later and finds the apartment empty.

Lila knows the large deposit and subsequent withdrawal of $3,350 — with the balance transferred to a would-be charity called Americans for the Vital Aid of Burkina Faso — must be relevant to Mattie’s whereabouts. Although she doesn’t want to spend time with Dix, she realizes his knowledge of the community and ability to charm people and get them talking will help in her search.

Through online research, Lila comes up with a name of a man possibly connected to the fake charity. She and Dix manage to grab the man, a Russian, before he’s rescued by gun-toting friends. Thinking fast before the Russians kill them, Dix is able to disable them with a few well-aimed hits using a baseball bat.

Information gleaned from the Russians leads the father-daughter team to another shady local thug who’s affiliated with one of the area’s most prosperous almond growers, Bill Mannion. The sheriff tells them the last place Mattie cleaned before getting the money transfer was Mannion’s warehouse. He suspects the almond grower is using government banned chemicals, which Mattie might have discovered — hence the payoff to keep her quiet.

Dix uses his persuasive skills and network of local contacts to wrangle admission to a political fundraiser hosted by Mannion. Once inside Mannion’s mansion, Lila creates a disturbance, allowing her to sneak outside to check out pesticide tanks inside the warehouse, where she’s nearly caught.

Lila’s belief that Dix isn’t involved in her mother’s disappearance is shaken when she learns he has $3,350 in cash stashed under the driver’s seat in his truck.

Alternating between past and present, in Get Lost Halpern lays out a trail with plenty of twists as Lila struggles to reconcile her conflicting feelings about Dix while dodging shady and violent characters in hopes of finding her mother.

Andrea Geary is a freelance writer in Selkirk.