The Vanishing Place

by Zoe Rankin

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

Jane Harper's FORCE OF NATURE meets the wild and atmospheric setting of THE GREAT ALONE by Kristin Hannah in this twisty stay-up-all-night thriller about family, love and loyalty, and the fight for survival in the most beautiful but dangerous New Zealand wilderness.

On the remote West Coast of the South Island, vast forests stretch out between mountain ranges and rugged beaches. There, in the small town of Koraha, not a lot happens - until a young girl with blood on her hands walks out of the bush and into the local store, collapsing to the floor.

She can't - or won't - speak to anyone. It's the town's sole policeman who recognises her face. She looks exactly like a local girl who disappeared twenty years ago. She has the same red hair. The same green eyes.

What horrors has she left behind in the bush? Who will come looking for her? And what secrets are about to come to light?

A twisty and daring thriller about how those close to you can be even more dangerous than the deadliest wilderness.

'From the deep dark wilds of the New Zealand bush to searing memories of sins past, The Vanishing Place breaks new ground in a genuinely thrilling ride' LISA GARDNER

'A hauntingly atmospheric tale of family secrets . . . will keep you up late at night' ROSE CARLYLE

'Near flawless. Richly rendered. Gripping. Page-turning. The Vanishing Place will appeal to fans of Jane Harper and readers drawn to emotionally complex thrillers' BOOKS+PUBLISHING

'A page turner that mesmerised me' PATRICIA WOLF

'A white-knuckle tale of evil and love' CHARITY NORMAN

Release date: September 16, 2025

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 384

Sample

November 2001

The West Coast Bush, New Zealand

The fourth of them burst into the world like a storm. Loud and messy and out of the blue.

Mum's newest bush child.

He slipped into the small hut screaming. Into their middle-of-nowhere home. Just trees and ferns and his big voice.

The baby was impossibly tiny, all smooshed and scrunched up, and his skin was pale purple. It was impossible that he was even there-his miniature body wrapped up in Effie's wool jumper-because Mum hadn't been pregnant. There had been no bulge under her T-shirt. No swelling in her bra. With Aiden, Mum's belly had swollen and grown white lines, but this time, her stomach had stayed its normal shape.

Effie held her new brother in her arms and tried to push the tip of her finger into his tiny mouth.

"Shh, baby."

When Aiden was tiny, Mum had spilled over with milk. Sometimes it had dripped through her shirt and Effie had looked away, embarrassed, the damp circles reminding her of a leaking cow.

"Sorry, little boy. I don't have anything for you."

The baby opened and closed his wrinkly purple fists and tried to push his face into Effie's jumper. At almost nine, her chest was still flat, but the baby didn't seem to notice.

"Stop it."

The boy's searching lips creeped her out, and Effie wanted Mum to take him away. Mum needed to feed him and bathe him like she did with Aiden. Babies needed to be fed all the time, but Mum hadn't moved since the baby had slipped from between her legs an hour ago. Dad had thrust him at Effie, his newborn body sticky with white slime, and slammed their bedroom door in her face. Dad's face had been strange, his familiar eyes dark in a way that Effie didn't recognize.

She stared at the closed door. Other than the main living area, where they cooked and slept and did schoolwork, it was the only room in their back-of-beyond hut. Effie adjusted her position on the sofa, careful to hold the boy's head. The younger kids had been sent outside to pick mouku and pikopiko to steam for dinner. There was no noise apart from the baby's cries and the tōtara trees knocking on the corrugated metal walls. Mum's screams had stopped ages ago, when the little hand on the clock was pointed at three. Effie held the boy tight, afraid she might drop him. She'd seen Mum hold Aiden a thousand times, but the baby was so floppy and fragile, and he didn't seem to do anything but cry.

"It's okay, little boy. Mum will be out soon."

Effie tried not to look at the bedroom door, or to imagine what was happening on the other side of it. Feeling bad things made them real, that was how the game worked-Mum's inside-out feelings game. Sometimes in the winter, the hut got so cold that Effie's toes went blue. Then Mum would knit them all bright-colored hut socks and odd-shaped quilts. But Effie hated the hut on those freezing days. It was too cold. Too small. Too ugly. It wasn't like the proper houses she saw in town. But Mum said it was. Mum
said that it was a proper home. She decorated their hut with pots of ferns and hung homemade art from the walls. Mum said that home was a feeling, a warm yellow tingle. So, they'd practice. They'd picture lots of yellow things. The sun. Kōwhai trees. Bumblebees. Hurukōwhai. Buttercups. Until the warm outside feeling became real and her toes didn't feel so blue.

But it wasn't working now. Effie needed Mum to make the game work. She needed Mum to come out of her bedroom and make everything normal again.

"Shh. Please." Effie shook the baby gently. "I don't know what to do."

Before Aiden came out, Mum had walked the six hours through the bush to the Roaring Billy Falls. Then she'd taken the tinnie across the river and hitched to Koraha to find a midwife. Mum had lined up small bottles by the sink-important baby vitamins-and she'd stopped hunting with Dad. But Mum hadn't done any of those things with number four. He'd just arrived, screaming like thunder.

Effie reached across the sofa for one of Aiden's old wooden toys. She shook the homemade rattle above the baby's head, but it was no use.

"Please, please stop crying."

Then, over the noise of his wails, she heard a crash from the bedroom-something breaking-and a pained angry yell. Effie wanted to run at the bedroom door, to batter at it with all her might. But Dad had been clear. No kids.

She held the baby tight, as if squeezing him might spare his tiny ears the sounds of anger. Then she closed her eyes. After the second crash, Effie slumped to the floor and pulled her knees in, supporting the baby. She needed to run, to get help. But there was nowhere to go. Just trees. No one to help them.

Effie rocked the baby and whispered words she'd only read in books, about a man in the sky who could save them. She was still rocking and muttering when the bedroom door creaked open and Dad appeared.

He was crying. Full, ugly tears. Effie froze, not wanting to be noticed. He would be embarrassed; Dad hated the weak bits in people. She'd never seen him cry, not even when the skinny hunting dog died. But now his face was a blotchy angry mess and his shirt was stained dark red.

"Get up," he muttered.

But she couldn't. He didn't look like Dad.

"Dad?" she whimpered.

But he didn't hug her. He stepped past them and yanked his jacket from the hook. Then, without looking at her or the baby, he stormed out.

The boy stirred in Effie's arms and she crawled forward, the wooden floor bashing against her knees. It was too quiet, too still-the hut limp like a gutted pig. Like there was no heart in it.

"Mum?"

Effie peered into the wrecked room. Mum's chair was broken in two, and her mirror lay in splinters across her favorite braided rug. The sheets and the floor were damp, stained with blood and another clear liquid. Effie stumbled to her feet, fighting pins and needles, then inched toward the bed. Toward Mum.

"Mum?"

Effie shook her arm.

"Mum!"

But Mum was already gone.

2025

Isle of Skye, Scotland

"This is beyond humiliating," Effie shouted as she struggled to stand in the gale-force winds. She pulled at the hood of her jacket, trying to shield her face, but the rain stung her cheeks.

"No," Blair shouted back, their bodies huddled together. "What would be humiliating would be dying on the side of this bloody mountain because you're too stubborn to ask for help."

"We can get down ourselves. You can lean on me."

"No! We absolutely cannot." Blair dug her fingers into Effie's arm, clinging to her, as a gust of wind threatened to topple them. "There's no way I'm walking out on this ankle. The rocks are like ice, and it's going to start getting bloody cold and dark."

"I can get-"

"We need to call mountain rescue."

"I am mountain rescue," yelled Effie, her words diluted to a whisper by the elements.

"Right now . . ." Blair said as she lowered them to a crouched position on the wet ground, "what you are is a stubborn idiot who's about to watch her best friend freeze to death with a sprained ankle. Or, quite possibly, get blown down the Dubh Slabs to end up as a puddle of flesh and bones at the bottom."

"I would never let that-"

"Then phone them."

Blair gestured with her gloved hand, and the small plastic buckle caught the side of Effie's eye. The tender area of cold skin screamed on impact, but she blinked it away.

"I can't." She glanced down as water dripped from her hair. "I'd never live it down. Keith would rib me about it forever and-"

"For Christ's sake, Effie. Listen to yourself." Blair rubbed furiously at her arms. "We could die. This isn't some game. This is our fucking lives."

"Greg will be on call," Effie murmured, without meeting her friend's eyes.

"So?" Blair's mascara had started to leak down her face. "That's great."

"We broke up last night."

Blair shuffled across the wet rocky ground, guarding her left foot, until they were snuggled together. Then she put a drenched arm around Effie.

"You need to phone them," she said again, but her voice was softer.

Effie looked out at where the Cuillin Ridge should have been. But there was nothing to see but gray and cloud and lashing rain. On a good day, she could have named every point from Loch Coruisk to the end of the curved mountain range-a route she'd completed a number of times. She'd once run the Black Cuillin stretch-all twenty-two summits and eleven Munros of it-in just four hours and three minutes, barely an hour off the world record.

"I know," said Effie.

"Oh, thank god." Blair exhaled. Then she buried her face into Effie's chest. "Cos there's no way I'd have the energy to fight you on it."

"Well . . ." Effie managed a smile. "I'm fully intending to tell Keith that you did-that you resorted to blackmail and forced my hand."

"Whatever gets me into a helicopter and off this fucking mountain with my fingers and toes still attached."

Effie sat for a moment, feeling the weight of her friend against her, then she pulled her phone from her pocket and cocooned it between her ear and hood.

"It was just bad luck, you know." Blair reached out and took Effie's hand. "Bad luck and shitty Scottish weather."

"Thanks, Bee."

Effie closed her eyes and held 2 for the mountain rescue team, a team she'd been a part of for eight years. As it rang, she prayed it wouldn't be Greg who picked up. The last thing he'd said to her, as she'd stormed from his flat, was that she'd end up dying alone on the side of some mountain. And as she'd slammed the door, she hadn't hated the idea.

"I know this shouldn't be in the least bit funny," said Blair, unable to keep the amusement from her quivering lips as Effie got off the phone with Keith. He'd promised to have a team deployed as soon as possible.

"It's not." Effie groaned and reached into her rucksack.

"But . . ." Blair smiled. "Come on, it's going to make for a great story."

"It's not."

It would take a while for the helicopter to fly in, and the wait would be more pleasant without the elements trying to drown them. Effie pulled out the storm shelter, wrestling against the wind, then she and Blair stood nose to nose, chest to chest, torso to torso, under the fluorescent-orange sheet. The waterproof fabric came down to just below their bottoms, leaving their legs exposed to the downpour.

"Right," said Effie, their faces just inches apart, "on three, we sit."

"Got it." Blair giggled.

"And," Effie continued, "remember to pull the seating panel underneath you so the water stays out."

"Loud and clear." Blair suppressed a laugh as a gust of wind thrust her forward and their cheeks smooshed together.

"One . . ." Effie started, ignoring Blair's snorts. "Two. Three."

As they lowered to the ground, the material formed a protective tent around them, their world reduced to a billowing orange bubble.

"This isn't so bad," Blair shouted over the flapping fabric. "Romantic, even."

Effie rolled her eyes. "Christ." She rubbed a hand across her face. "Seriously, even now?"

"Now what?"

"I don't know." Effie couldn't help but smile. "I thought that maybe, just maybe, the threat of death might have dampened your . . . your . . ."

"My what?"

"Your infuriatingly persistent enthusiasm."

"Aw, come on." Blair nudged Effie's leg with her foot. "You love it."

"I tolerate it."

"And I tolerate you nearly letting us die on our girls' day out." Blair smirked. "So we're even."

Effie smiled back, and for the next few minutes, they sat in a comfortable silence as the orange nylon flapped around them and the rain pummeled the two circular windows.

The natural light had all but vanished from the evening sky, swallowed up by October's bleakness, and they were relying on two head-torches. One remained off, safe in Effie's pocket, while the other was around her hat. Half an hour later, when the phone buzzed twice in her pocket-two texts coming through at once-Effie knew something was wrong. Removing her gloves, she opened the messages. The first from Keith. Then Greg.

"What is it?" asked Blair.

Effie looked at her phone, then back at her friend. "The chopper from Stornoway had to turn around . . . because of the severe winds."

"So"-Blair took a breath-"no helicopter?"

Effie shook her head.

"No cozy airlift out?"

"I'm afraid not," said Effie.

"What happens now?"

"Keith said they've already prepped a team to head out on foot."

Blair's eyes widened. "In this?"

"Yeah." The muscles in Effie's stomach tightened. "They know what they're doing, Bee."

"Fuck." She glanced down at the flooded ground. "So did we."

The shelter muted the outside storm, creating an eerie quiet. But after a minute's silence, Blair looked up. "How long will it take them?"

"Five to six hours," said Effie. "Maybe longer. The conditions are-"

"Less than ideal," finished Blair.

Effie actually laughed. "Yes. They are definitely less than ideal."

"And this plastic bag of yours," said Blair, gesturing at the emergency shelter. "It can hold its own?"

"You, my friend," said Effie, "are sitting within 275 grams of mountaineering gold. I can personally guarantee you an almost warm, almost dry, mostly bearable night."

"Excellent. It already sounds better than night shift at the hospital."

"Fewer intoxicated patients. Less assistance with toileting."

"God, I hope so." Blair grimaced. "Neither of us is peeing until I can urinate without fear of it blowing in my face."

"I'm sorry," Effie muttered. "Again. For getting us into this situation."

"We just got caught out, Effie. The weather turned and conditions changed." Blair sighed. "Then I did my bloody ankle. Shit happens, and sometimes there's nothing we can do about it."

Effie squeezed Blair's hand.

"So," said Blair, "what happened with Greg?"

"I'm not sure this-"

"This is exactly the time." She grinned. "It's not like I'm going anywhere. So spill. You owe me some gossip at least."

"You're awful. You know that, right?"

"Yes, I do."

"It was nothing. Nothing new, anyway." Effie fiddled with her zip. "The same hashed-out argument."

"You being an irrational commitment-phobe?"

"Yeah."

"Couldn't you just get a set of keys cut for the poor man? He's at your place half the time anyway. Then maybe, down the line, you might feel differently."