#BookReview ‘The Night They Vanished’ by Vanessa Savage

About the book…

Due to be published on the 22nd May by Little Brown, I am so pleased to be able to bring you my thought on the fabulous thriller, ‘The Night They Vanished’ by Vanessa Brown. My e-arc review copy was kindly provided by the publishers, courtesy of Netgalley.

A family with a secret.

A past about to catch up with them.

Hanna has barely spoken to her family since the tragedy that rocked their lives fourteen years ago. The tragedy for which they held Hanna responsible.

Then she sees her family home listed as the scene of a horrific crime. Number of victims: three. Date of crime: today. Frantic, Hanna tries to contact her family, only to find they have disappeared.

To find them, Hanna will have to confront what happened all those years ago.

And the person determined to make her pay for it . . .

This is a complex novel which walks a tightrope of tension between domestic thriller, and psychological suspense mystery, that hits every single mark that you would expect in each genre.

You have two main protagonists-Hanna and her sister Sasha-whose first person narratives give you an intimate connection to their experiences. Hanna has re-invented herself, after a fashion, from leaving her home at 16, having a strained relationship with her father , step- other and step-sister turning into Christmas cards unopened, voicemails not returned until she has summoned up the strength to read them. In Sasha’s passages, which build up a back story until the point at which both hers, and Hanna’s dovetail, shows how life was like for Hanna in a restrictive regime, has worsened for her.

Hanna was held as the example of the girl who had everything and threw it all away, they use her vanishing and lack of care as a cautionary tale of the damage that drinks and drugs can do to a young girl. They completely do not realise that the resentment that they are building with their rules is headed in their direction and Hanna becomes a bit of an icon to Sasha.

Sasha grows up, as Hanna did, with a failed academic father , Daniel, and step-mother to Hanna, mother of her own, Jen. She has no phone, no social media, no friends and lives on a caravan park which is the magnet for the kids in her class to go and do what teens have done since time immemorial. Sasha hears it all from her bedroom and her isolation just makes her a sitting duck for the girls in her class to pick on her.  The only hope she clings to is that she will one day be like Hanna and leave of her own free will, and never look back.

Hanna’s complex back story is slowly revealed after we have seen her introduced as a woman who has strength in leaving an abusive boyfriend, putting her life back together and having her own home. She has moved closer to uni friends, Seb and Dee, and the Welsh setting is so relatable, the small town nature of gossip spreading, until the point where everyone thinks they know what happened, but no-one ever did. Like the time Nirvana came to play the local Rec-true story-and if it held everyone who claimed to have seen them, then the ironically named Great Hall would have had a capacity almost that of the Millennium Stadium.

However, I digress, the seaside caravan park setting is haunting and haunted. Sasha is living with the ghost of her older sister’s transgressions which have become local lore, and now they are moving just after Christmas.

So when a website which specialises in ‘Dark Tourism’, urban exploration of murder sites with a literary twist, turns up a breaking story about the death of Hanna’s entire family, complete with pictures , for a date which is actually today, Hanna’s alarm bells begin to ring.

Unfortunately, the website that this turns up on, is the site of a friend of Seb and Dee’s, someone they went to uni with and who they have just set Hanna up on a date with…

Adam seems perfectly lovely, but just how much does anyone know about him?

Did he only go out with Hanna to expose her tragic back story on his website?

Could anyone truly be that manipulative?

Taking a frank and honest look at the human cost of the salacious true crime websites, this novel pulls no punches when it asks us to look at our motivations for checking out the sites of truly horrendous crimes that are still explored for various reasons by tourists. In effect, we are tourists to the lives-and deaths-of others, so what is the difference between visiting a grave in a public place or walking through a long abandoned house?

Are the dark tourists just looking for the truth or a quick thrill?

What happens when a creator of such a site comes face to face with the very human subjects of his articles, and, furthermore, is intrinsically involved when they both try and find Hanna’s family to find they have disappeared without a trace?

A dark and nuanced story with some really great twists and turns-I thought I had figured out whodunnit, truly I had not-this further establishes Vanessa as a writer to watch!

About the author…

Vanessa Savage lives by the sea in South Wales with her husband and two daughters. She started out writing women’s fiction but soon realized she wanted her characters to kill each other rather than kiss each other… Turning to crime, she now writes psychological thrillers.

Her first novel is the brilliant, ‘The Woman In The Dark’ followed by last year’s ‘The Woods’

Links-https://vanessasavage.co.uk/

Twitter @LittleBrownUK @VvSavage