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
Have you read Page One: Vanished? How would you rate it?
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.
