The vanishing place

Rankin debuts with a triumphant thriller set in rural New Zealand. At the outset, a blood-stained child named Anya enters a grocery store in the village of Koraha and starts pulling items from the shelves and devouring them. When Constable Lewis Weston arrives, he's stunned at her resemblance to an old friend named Effie, who disappeared from New Zealand two decades earlier before resurfacing as a police officer in Scotland. Effie is rattled by the possibility that she and Anya might be related; when she learns that the girl is the only witness to a murder, she returns to New Zealand. Doing so drums up memories of her own lonely childhood with controlling parents who isolated the family deep in the bush. Chapters detailing Effie's murder investigation and Anya's origins alternate with flashbacks to 2001, when Effie's mother died in childbirth and her father fled their home. Rankin expertly manages the parallel timelines, drawing out key questions about Effie's past as the narrative toggles back and forth, and her prose is often ruggedly beautiful ("The barbed silence moved through her, as if the blades of silver fern traced her skin"). This is a must-read for fans of Jane Harper. Agent: Stephanie Glencross, David Higham Assoc. (Sept.)

The New Zealand bush is the backdrop in this tale of survival and family secrets. Half-starved and covered with blood, a young girl stumbles into a grocery store in a remote village on the outskirts of the unforgiving, heavily forested bush. She can't speak, but she looks just like a girl who went missing in the bush 20 years before. This explosive opener is just the first of many shocking scenes in a nature-centric, highly satisfying crime drama that is perfect for fans of Emma Donoghue'sRoom (2010) and other tales of survival. After the girl's discovery, the plot segues roughly 11,000 miles north to where Effie, the girl who went missing decades before, is working and living on Scotland's Isle of Skye. Effie doesn't know the newly found girl, but their shared physical traits--red hair and green eyes--and the community where she was discovered are enough to pull Effie back to the place she hoped she would never see again. Returning to the bush cracks open the story of Effie's harrowing and heartbreaking childhood of isolation and deprivation, and, as it's slowly revealed, the story of the girl, whose name is Anya, who has endured far worse. When Anya runs away, Effie must return to the bush to rescue her and in the process discover the fate of her long-missing family and reckon with her past. Rankin deftly reveals Effie's and Anya's experiences in parallel storylines that eventually meld into one. Neither Effie nor this novel's hypnotized readers can be prepared for what she finds. As rich as Rankin's entrancing and skillfully developed plot are her immersive descriptions of the bush country: "A world of a thousand greens, where trees rose to the sky like gods." It's like being there yourself. You'll get lost in the wilds with this gripping debut. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.