The Missing is a series of young adult science fiction novels by Margaret Peterson Haddix, in which a group of teenagers discover and get mixed up with an operation using Time Travel to steal famous children from history.
- Found (2008)
- Sent (2009)
- Sabotaged (2010)
- Torn (2011)
- Caught (2012)
- Risked (2013)
- Revealed (2014)
- Redeemed (2015)
This series contains examples of:
- Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: The series involves a future where rich families pay a corporation to go back in time and kidnap certain famous children (usually famous missing children, such as Anastasia and Charles Lindbergh Jr.), while they are babies. The children are then taken back to the future for these families to raise as their own. Except the ones that accidentally end up in our time.
- Big Bad Duumvirate: Gary and Hodge, the main villains for the first 7 books.
- Casual Time Travel: The future time that the kidnappers are from has this.
- Oppressive Immigration Enforcement: After Jonah starts trying to investigate the circumstances of his adoption, supposed FBI Agent Mr. Reardon threatens to arrest Jonah's parents and deport Jonah. Notably, Jonah is only thirteen and was adopted as a baby and Reardon refuses to even tell Jonah where he might be deported to.
- Raise Him Right This Time: The ultimate fate of Gary and Hodge.
- The Tape Knew You Would Say That: The character Second manages this using a combination of knowledge he gained through time-travel and advanced technology.
- The Unreveal: Jonah and Jordan aren't anybody important. Just 2 starving orphans. Although Jordan's existence is The Reveal.
- Time Travel Escape: People from the future do this with the missing children of the past (e.g Anastasia), and give them to families in the future. Unfortunately, the time machine went wrong and ended up in an airport in the 90s. When people found it, it was an airplane filled with babies. These babies were put into foster care and adopted by various families.
- Tricked Out Time: The series follows young siblings Jonah and Katherine as they travel back in time after learning that Jonah, along with 36 other children, are actually famous individuals from the past that experianced early deaths, and that they were removed from time to be saved from an impending death and sold off in a future by smugglers. However, this caused a ripple across time that led to the present and future not following the "proper timeline." In the series, Jonah and Katherine must return the children to their rightful places in the timeline, but they trick time by time travelling away with the person who was meant to die at the last second, slowly creating a Stable Time Loop with each child "returned."
- Young Future Famous People: Many of the characters, including several of the protagonists, turn out to be famous people who disappeared as children, such as the Princes in the Tower.
- You Will Be Beethoven: Done with a twist, as some of the kidnapped children have to become themselves by returning to their original time and playing out the version of their lives history remembers, in order to preserve the timeline.
