The Vanishing Place

Rankin debuts with a triumphant thriller set in rural New Zealand. At the outset, a blood-stained child named Anya enters a grocery store in the village of Koraha and starts pulling items from the shelves and devouring them. When Constable Lewis Weston arrives, he’s stunned at her resemblance to an old friend named Effie, who disappeared from New Zealand two decades earlier before resurfacing as a police officer in Scotland. Effie is rattled by the possibility that she and Anya might be related; when she learns that the girl is the only witness to a murder, she returns to New Zealand. Doing so drums up memories of her own lonely childhood with controlling parents who isolated the family deep in the bush. Chapters detailing Effie’s murder investigation and Anya’s origins alternate with flashbacks to 2001, when Effie’s mother died in childbirth and her father fled their home. Rankin expertly manages the parallel timelines, drawing out key questions about Effie’s past as the narrative toggles back and forth, and her prose is often ruggedly beautiful (“The barbed silence moved through her, as if the blades of silver fern traced her skin”). This is a must-read for fans of Jane Harper. Agent: Stephanie Glencross, David Higham Assoc. (Sept.)