Vanish by Shelley Burr

Vanish is the third book in Shelley Burr’s Australian crime series that started with the award winning Wake. Investigator Lane Holland is back, still in prison when the book opens but he is soon investigating again, in a limited capacity. Also back in this book are characters from earlier books including Lane’s sister and the person he went to prison for, Mina McCreery. Once again Burr manages to deliver an Australian rural crime novel that does not quite follow the mould of many of her contemporaries.

Carver, the head of the prison where Lane is serving his sentence is still keen to find his daughter Matilda, missing for twenty years. And it turns out that Lane has become a little obsessed with the case also, continuing to investigate with a contraband phone. He has found out that Matilda was last seen at a farm in the Riverina where another young person went missing. That farm, run by a family called Karpathy, is more of a commune and Lane suspects some sort of cult. Carver uses a prison outreach and training program to get Lane placed at that farm (together with one of the guards) in the hope that Lane can uncover what happened to Matilda. On the day Lane arrives a member of the community at the farm dies in a car accident and he soon finds that there has been at least one other mysterious disappearance.

Burr does a great job in Vanish in slowly building the pressure. Lane can see all of the techniques used by Karpathy to control the people on the farm but on the other hand, can not quite seem to be able to prove that that control is coercive. Burr keeps both Lane and the reader off balance as the clues build but fail to make a coherent picture. Meanwhile, Lane as always, goes slightly beyond his remit, potentially making himself a target and putting his chances of parole at peril.

While it opens with flooding, bushfire has become the existential threat that seems to make an appearance in every Australian rural crime novel at the moment. And Vanish is no exception, adding an extra layer of jeopardy to the climax.

While part of a trilogy, Vanish is more of a sequel to Wake, bringing many of the hanging threads from that novel to a satisfactory resolution. Vanish is another great crime novel from Burr, showing an ability to continue to bring new insights and approaches and stand out in the crowded Australian rural crime genre.

Vanish by Shelley Burr

9

9.0/10