Steve Almond's first novel is about a missing-persons case, a subgenre that tends to present a writer with a very 21st-century challenge: How to explain a character's disappearance in an age of cellphones and global positioning systems?

One solution is to set the action in the recent past, with its busy signals and hastily scribbled correspondence. At first glance, Almond seems to have chosen this route in "All the Secrets of the World," which opens in 1981. But the real explanation for his decades-ago story line is much more interesting — he's been writing this book for 30 years.

The author of several short-story collections and nonfiction titles, Almond has crafted an insightful debut novel involving a police investigation that threatens to destroy two families.

Lorena Saenz, the daughter of undocumented immigrants, and Jenny Stallworth, whose parents are rich and influential, are partnering on a middle-school project. Visiting the Stallworths' mansion in Sacramento, Lorena bonds with Jenny's father, Marcus, an academic who studies scorpions. His interest in the 13-year-old soon turns unwholesome, and after her older brother Tony grows suspicious and threatens Marcus, the professor disappears.

To police, there are two plausible explanations. Either Marcus lost his way while doing fieldwork in the mountains, or Tony kidnapped and killed Marcus. Lorena offers another theory: Maybe the unpretentious professor, at odds with his status-conscious wife Rosemary, vanished on purpose.

It's a plot replete with treacherous relationships, punishing landscapes and biblical allusions. Marcus' beguiling but dangerous scorpions serve as an oft-effective metaphor that Almond returns to — perhaps a bit too frequently — throughout the book. Meanwhile, Almond crafts some beautiful prose. A dying character yearns "to ascend, to take his place amid the riot of dead souls and flickering stars that disappeared before dawn lit the world."

Lorena's intelligence and resolve fuel the story. Lest she do something that gets her mother, Graciela, deported, she lives in a "prison of careful habits," Almond writes. Telling a police officer about her relationship with the Stallworths, the normally articulate Lorena can't find the right words — "an awkward moment, so familiar in American life, when the unspoken fact of class rudely presents itself."

But when the moment calls for it, she's bold and galvanizing, a brainy battler. Her perpetually angry brother Tony is an equally credible character, his insecurities and psychological wounds explored in vivid flashback scenes.

Conversely, some of Almond's flash-forwards — closing-act scenes that tell us what becomes of the characters in decades ahead — have a hurried quality that saps some of the book's narrative energy. This is a forgivable shortcoming in an otherwise well-constructed novel. Almond lived with some of these characters for decades, so it's easy to understand why he had a hard time saying goodbye.

Almond, a white man, will likely be criticized in some quarters for trying to imagine the inner lives of vulnerable people — women, in particular — with Central American roots. Though more than a few complaints of this sort are ahistorical and appear to be lodged by people who've not read the book in question, they're worth considering if a writer seems to sensationalize, fetishize or in some other way exploit his characters' plight. Almond doesn't, though — not at all, which will be obvious to anyone who reads this imperfect yet compassionate novel.

Kevin Canfield is a writer in New York City.

All the Secrets of the World

By: Steve Almond.

Publisher: Zando, 416 pages, $28.

Event: In conversation with Jennifer Bowen, 7 p.m. May 25, Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Av. S., Mpls.