Ellery Hathaway knows a thing or two about serial killers.
Not because she’s a police officer in a sleepy American town, where most offences are so minor they’re barely worth ticketing, but because she survived being kidnapped by one in her teens. Now an adult, Ellery fiercely guards her past secrets, but she also knows something else that no one else does: a serial killer is stalking this town.
What’s it about?
Ellery and the FBI agent who saved her from a serial killer – and how to catch the serial killer who is stalking Ellery now…
For the past three years, Ellery has received a birthday card close to her birthday. No big deal, you might think, except that Ellery has taken care to ensure that no one in her current life knows when her birthday is, let alone the horrific events that happened to her on her fourteenth birthday. Who is sending her these cards? Are they taunting Ellery…or warning her?
Each year that Ellery receives a card, a member of her community vanishes. The rest of the local police force are satisfied that the disappeared had their own reasons to do so, but Ellery is convinced they’re dead, and as the clock ticks down to another birthday and another disappearance, she reaches out for help from the detective who rescued her all those years ago.
What’s it like?
There’s an excellent prologue that sets the tone for the book, which is sinister without being gory. ‘The Vanishing Season’ is well plotted with largely convincing characterisation, though Ellery is remarkably uneducated vis-Ã -vis the workings of the internet. Given she only just escaped a serial killer with her life, she is understandably vulnerable and defensive, though it seems genuinely not to occur to her that the best way to make the local police force take her seriously would be to reveal her own situation.
FBI agent Reed Markham is a mess: his marriage is ending and his career might be, too. His own fame as the detective who saved the Hathaway girl from a notorious serial killer haunts him as he obsesses over less successful cases and begins to wonder how much of her he life actually saved… Despite all this, his common sense leads him to consider the obvious (could Ellery be sending herself the birthday cards? Or if a serial killer really is messaging her, is he after her, too?) and the pair work together and separately to try to identify the culprit. Can they solve the mystery before another person disappears? Someone is about to raise the stakes…
Final thoughts
I enjoyed reading this suspenseful crime thriller, which mixed elements of a police procedural with a psychological thriller, and thought it was well plotted. Yes, you could guess the culprit towards the end, but you’ll definitely be wondering about other characters first, following the crooked path Schaffhausen has created.
I was very surprised to learn from Goodreads that this was the start of a series, as the plot is so closely tied to Ellery’s own past, and I was also a little concerned by a few stray thoughts Ellery and Markham experience later in the story. The older man who rescued a vulnerable young girl from a psychopath who abused her definitely isn’t going to start seeing that young girl ‘in a different light’ now she’s grown up, right? I’m intrigued to try the next in the series, because I thought this was really good, but I’m sincerely hoping that Ellery and Reed continue to work as a team, not become a potential couple, which would just be icky.