Vanished, by Lynn Gardner
Reviewed
by Jennie Hansen
Hold
onto your hats! Lynn Gardner has begun a new series, starting
with Vanished, a keep-you-awake mystery. Gardner’s
previous “jewel” mystery series was fun and scarcely gave readers
an opportunity to catch their breath between exciting scenes,
but this new series takes the reader to an entirely new level.
Always
a good writer, Gardner has matured to an exceptional writer with
this new venture. The protagonist is Maggie McKenzie, a young,
single newspaper reporter. Maggie’s first job as a full-fledged
reporter takes her to San Buenaventura, California, a long way
from her family in a tiny rural community in Idaho. Having won
a contest that guaranteed her a job, she’s shocked when the office
manager denies she knows anything about her. She’s also confused
by the office manager’s strange reaction to meeting her.
Maggie
is given a dream assignment to follow the trail Lewis and Clark
traveled and write a series of articles commemorating the bicentennial
of their Voyage of Discovery. Before she can leave on her assignment,
a series of strange happenings piques her curiosity about a seven-year-old
mystery concerning the kidnapping of her new employer’s daughter
on her sixteenth birthday. Intrigued, she coerces the office
manager into giving her a copy of the file on the case. She reasons
that since she is traveling to the same area where several people
claimed to have seen the missing girl, she could check out their
stories while working on the Lewis and Clark series.
A
strange phenomenon begins to happen to Maggie as thoughts and
ideas pop into her head with increasing frequency. It seems as
though the missing girl is trying to communicate with her. Eventually
the contact becomes frightening, and she begins to fear the other
girl is taking over her mind. From the time she visits the first
community where a reported sighting of the kidnapped girl took
place, finding “Katie” assumes a greater part of her time and
attention than the series she has been assigned to write. As
she travels from one location to the next she encounters a psychologist,
Flynn, who is pursuing the study of the mental connectivity that
occasionally occurs between two individuals, which is primarily
recognized as peculiar to twins. Flynn suggests the two girls
might actually be twins, but Maggie is certain they couldn’t be.
Her parents would never give up a child and her older brothers
remember her mother’s pregnancy. She has seen pictures taken
of her mother shortly before her birth.
Maggie
and Flynn form a friendship which is partly doctor/patient in
character and partly something more personal. Murder and intrigue
run rampant as they pursue clues to the missing girl’s disappearance.
In
Gardner’s earlier books the action is so fast, the reader is hard
put to absorb one crisis before being plunged into the next one.
In Vanished, more attention is given to building
each scene, playing it out, and moving smoothly into the next.
This smoother style lends more credence to the action and builds
the suspense to a higher pitch. It also eliminates that breathless
sense of running every-which-way some readers have noted in her
earlier work. She still switches point of view a little more rapidly
than necessary, but she doesn’t leave her readers scrambling to
know whose head they are in. Her earlier books have also been
criticized for the way religious or spiritual aspects of the story
appeared to be afterthoughts. Not so with Vanished.
Here there is a smooth blending that feels natural rather than
contrived and is one of the strengths of the book.
Gardner
also takes care to explain both psychological theories and religious
elements that are key to the story. The whole realm of mental
connectivity is a difficult subject to explore in fiction. Many
authors who have tried have strayed from LDS doctrine concerning
agency, out-of-body experiences, and the known facts of this phenomenon
into the realms of fantasy or science fiction. Gardner approaches
the subject from both known medical evidence and sound doctrine.
I
highly recommend this book to those who enjoy a good mystery,
anyone with a curious nature, and to all those who have been waiting
for a really top-ranked mystery series to join the ranks of the
growing list of LDS genres.
--
Vanished, by Lynn Gardner
Published
by Covenant Communications, 361 pages, $19.95
