SOURCE: “Make That Thy Quest, and Go Rot,” in Spectator, November 20, 1993, p. 45.

In the following review, Wagner offers a positive assessment of The Search.

[In The Search] Rachel meets Walker at a party and sends him off to find her vanished husband. Straightforward: Walker's a tracker, a retriever of the disappeared, and Rachel sends him on his way with a promise of big money and a wad of papers in his pocket that the missing man must sign and fingerprint. It goes without saying that Walker is half in love with the lovely and mysterious Rachel. This is familiar territory.

Not for long. Walker sets out into a nameless but familiar landscape, wide American spaces and freight trains and freeways. But Walker's method, or lack of it, is disturbing: he drifts from town to town following a trail so vague it could be of his own invention. The...