Vanished by James Delargy

I would like to thank Anne from Random Tours and Simon & Schuster for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for fair and honest review

Publisher – Simon & Schuster

Published – Out Now

Price – £14.99 hardback £4.99 Kindle eBook

The Kane family, Lorcan, Naiyana and their young son, relocate from Perth to Kallayee, an abandoned mining town in the Great Victoria Desert to start over again, free from their chequered past.

The town seems like the perfect getaway: Peaceful. Quiet. Remote. Somewhere they won’t be found.

But life in Kallayee isn’t quite as straightforward as they hope. There are noises in the earth, mysterious shadows and tracks in the dust as if the town is coming back to life.

But the family can’t leave. No one can talk sense into them.

And now, no one can talk to them at all.

They’ve simply vanished.

Now it's up to Detective Emmaline Taylor to find them… before it’s too late.

We all at some point seek a fresh start that chance to start again and hope this time everything goes right. But our past experiences will always be with us and will influence our choices in the future. Sometimes this gives us the wisdom to avoid making them again and sometimes it means we repeat them. In James Delargy’s thriller Vanished a young family trying to avoid their past make their way to an empty Australian Gold Rush town to make a new life and then vanish from the face of the earth leaving a determined detective to uncover their pasts.

In the Great Victoria Desert of Australia lies the empty decaying town of Kallayee – population 0. It was created in the Australian Gold Rush but proved a short-term bubble for miner’s hopes and dreams that all burst. No one has lived there for 50 years and there are just decaying rusting buildings and the odd kangaroo skeleton. To this arrive the Maguire family – Lorcan and his wife Naiyana with heir six-year-old boy Dylan. They seek to live here and start again removing the mistakes of their past – writing a book and a blog about their experiences. But then no one heard from them and Detective Emmeline Taylor who specialises in major crimes is sent to investigate. Signs are that the family home saw something bad happen and as the investigation explores the Maguires we see both had secrets that may have come back to haunt them.

This is an interesting thriller using a setting many of us in the UK will be very unfamiliar with. Delargy uses a shifting third person narration moving both back and forth to the Maguire’s arrival in Kallayee and allowing us to see what happened and watching Emmeline’s investigation. Interesting we also get the narration focusing on different characters and we see the inner thoughts of the Maguires and see the tensions between them as they start what for this previously very wealthy and famous family is now having to start from a home that doesn’t even have an indoor toilet. For the reader, the hook is can we find out what happened to lead to their disappearance.

The atmosphere is aided by the location we feel the family’s isolation and when Dylan keeps getting woken by a strange rumbling in the earth, we realise that family may not be as isolated as we thought. This provides the tension as we se as the family meet their other ‘neighbours’ a rising tension with no where left to go. In Emmeline’s future storyline the clues and signs of a bad situation getting worse as we are thrown a number of potential suspects tied to the Maguire’s past. The plot takes a while to get into fourth gear, but it does then get into a feel of a pressure cooker about to explode.

This is a novel where for many characters they keep making the worst possible decisions which may make the reader ask would anyone really do that?  The Maguires in particular seem to specialise in this and Lorcan’s desperation to reverse all his misfortunes is the catalyst to start the drama that unfolds. Alone and left to their devices no one gets to say to them don’t do this and Lorcan and Naiyana’s deteriorating relationship makes things worse. As a counterpoint I enjoyed in the form of our detective Emmeline’s very straight bat approach – a woman from out of town she quickly sets out she is in charge and follows the evidence where it leads. But this is less a tale of clues and more a family tragedy we as the reader watch in slow motion.

For me this was a solid thriller with a very interesting background and told in a way that will not make the reader immediately guess what happened. I liked the exploration of desperate people making desperate decisions in a desert that doesn’t care who lives or dies in it. For a novel set in the sunshine of Australia it can make your blood get very cold reading it.