Published by Grand Central Publishing/Cardinal on July 7, 2026
Get Lost is consistently amusing and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. That makes it a perfect beach read.
Mattie Wilkerson hated Los Armarios. She lived and worked and raised a daughter in the small California town, but every now and then Mattie disappeared. She always came back, but her daughter, Lila Dixon, often worried that Mattie wouldn’t return.
Lila’s father, John Dixon (known to all as “Dix”), loves Los Armarios. He played high school baseball there. He bought a house there right after he signed a minor league contract. He didn’t make it to the majors — in fact, he served time in prison — but he still enjoys the life of a small-town hero.
Dix wasn’t a great husband to Mattie and hasn’t been a good father to Lila, but he persuaded a friend to give Lila a job scouting high school baseball players. Lila hates the job but, to be fair, Lila hates pretty much everything about her life. She’s always hated getting calls when her mother disappears but has always dutifully traveled back to Los Armarios to await her return.
The story begins when Lila’s boss, Arturo Jimenez, calls Lila to tell her that her mother is missing. Lila is unconcerned because Mattie goes missing all the time. Arturo gets her attention by telling her that he learned about Mattie from Dix. When Lila points out that her father hasn’t spoken to her mother in twenty years and asks how Dix knows she’s missing, Arturo explains that Dix called him from jail and that the cops think he killed Mattie.
Lila drives to Los Armarios, where Sheriff John Bonsall tells her that video footage shows Lila’s mother entering her apartment building but no footage shows her leaving. All the windows in her apartment were locked from the inside and a security chain was on her door. Bonsall used to drop in on her to perform an informal wellness check from time to time, and he saw her there a day after she entered the building. The video showed her father entering the apartment building for ten minutes the following day. The day after that, a neighbor reported her missing. So how did she leave the building without being captured by the camera?
Lila is convinced that her mother is fine, but she devotes the rest of the novel to finding an answer to that question. She also interacts (reluctantly) with her father, who is soon released from jail for lack of evidence that he did anything to cause Lila’s disappearance.
Is Mattie alive? Lila receives a text message, purportedly from Mattie, that claims Lila’s investigation is making her unsafe. She also receives threats telling her to back off. Her investigation uncovers a large deposit to Mattie’s bank account and a large disbursement to a suspicious charity a few days later. The story turns Lila into an amateur detective as she tries to solve the riddle of her missing mother.
Many of the story’s laughs come from Dix’s attempts to convince Lila that he isn’t as bad as she thinks he is, followed by Lila providing copious evidence of his poor parenting skills and bad character. Lila’s long-held anger is easy to understand and may explain why she is so miserable. Yet Lila isn’t such a disagreeable character that readers will be disinclined to spend time with her.
Justin Halpern’s portrayal of Dix as a charming conman who lives in the memory of his past glories — enabled by townies who bask in the glow of his minor league celebrity — is consistently funny. Halpern could have ruined the story with a sappy reconciliation, but he makes the wise choice to sprinkle in a heartwarming moment or two, raising the possibility that with a lot of effort by both Lila and Dix, they might avoid being estranged for the rest of their lives. How that will work out is left to the reader’s imagination.
Lila eventually devises a theory that explains how the money that entered and left Mattie’s account might relate to her mother’s disappearance. By the end of the story, she also tumbles upon an explanation for the locked room mystery. The explanation comes with a reveal. As tradition dictates, a character who isn’t an obvious suspect turns out to be at the heart of the mystery.
Get Lost works well enough as a light mystery, but its value lies in the family dynamic between Lila and Dix. In addition to providing a vehicle for the comedy that poor parent-child relationships can inspire, the hope that the father and daughter might find a way to reconnect, that Lila might find a way to forgive or at least accept Dix, adds a sweetness to the story that blends well with the novel’s mix of comedy and crime.
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