Page
One: Vanished
A Robin Hamilton
Mystery
Nancy Barr
Arbutus Press (Trade Paperback)
ISBN-10: 1-933926-16-3 (1933926163)
ISBN-13: 978-1-933926-16-2 (9781933926162)
Publication Date: May 2007
List Price: $16.95
Synopsis (from
the publisher): While browsing through an eclectic used bookstore in
Copper Harbor, Michigan,
Robin Hamilton, vacationing newspaper reporter, spies a dusty old
scrapbook with a cover photo of a young girl with golden brown eyes.
The label reads Mary Jo Quinn – 1960-1974. Inside, newspaper
clippings from regional newspapers cover Mary Jo’s sudden
disappearance on her last day of school in 1974. Robin’s
journalist instincts come alive and she starts asking questions about
the scrapbook and the girl whose body was never found.
Then Robin’s friend Charlie Baker, an Escanaba city cop,
mentions
a girl who disappeared from Ishpeming in ’79 – just
vanished. More questions by Robin produce similar news stories, first
from Robin’s newspaper editor and then from her father
—
about two more teenage girls, one missing from Manistique and another
from Kingsford —both vanished without a clue or body ever
found.
Now Robin has the scent and begs her editor for time and an expense
account to pursue clues and a news story. The hunt takes Robin across
the length and breadth of the U.P. and into her own recent and distant
past, tracking the fates of five unfortunate girls over a span of 30
years.
The girls remain hidden—the mystery itself out of
sight—until Robin Hamilton encounter the hideous truth.
Review:
Nancy Barr's second Robin Hamilton mystery, Page One: Vanished,
opens with the small town reporter finding a scrapbook in a used
bookstore that prompts her to investigate the disappearance of a young
girl over 30 years ago.
While discussing the scrapbook with a friend, she learns another girl
disappeared in the same general area, though many years later. As she
continues to pursue her story, she discovers several teenaged girls had
disappeared without a trace over a three decade period. But the only
thing they apparently had in common was their interest in the arts:
music, painting, and the like. When another girl vanishes, Robin is
convinced it's related to the disappearance of all the others, and is
determined to find out who is responsible.
Certainly a great appeal of this series is the setting. Both the first
book in this series and this one are set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
There are no large cities in this sparsely populated region, just small
towns widely separated. As a reporter for a local newspaper, she
doesn't have access to all of the resources a large city daily would
have, and her low-tech pursuit for the truth is exciting to follow. In
the end, Barr puts an unexpected twist on the highly foreshadowed
conclusion making it much more intriguing than it otherwise would have
been.
At over 300 pages, Page
One: Vanished is far too long for the story being told.
True, Robin has a lot of ground to cover during her investigation, but
it isn't strictly necessary to relate every detail of every trip she
takes as she travels from one town to the next. And she does a lot of
traveling. It's interesting at first, but rapidly gets repetitive.
Robin Hamilton is one small town
investigative reporter that is worth getting to know. It's not
essential to read the first two books in order, but doing so helps the
reader understand some of her development as a character here. One can
look forward to a third book in the series: a hint to its storyline is
given in the final paragraphs of Page
One: Vanished.
Special thanks to Arbutus Press for providing a copy of Page One: Vanished for this review.
Review Copyright © 2007 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved.
Mysteries in this series ...
Page
One: Hit and Run
Arbutus Press (Trade Paperback), July 2006
ISBN-10: 1-933926-15-5 (1933926155)
ISBN-13: 978-1-933926-15-5 (9781933926155)
Page One: Vanished
Arbutus Press (Trade Paperback), May 2007
ISBN-10: 1-933926-16-3 (1933926163)
ISBN-13: 978-1-933926-16-2 (9781933926162)
Omnimystery keywords for Page One: Vanished
...
Location(s) referenced: Upper Peninsula, Michigan.