VANISH

Book 0: Lane Holland

by Shelley Burr

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Private Investigators; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

People go to the isolated Karpathy farm looking for a new life - and are never seen again. A chilling thriller from the award-winning and bestselling author of Australian noir, Shelley Burr.

Lane Holland's crime-solving career ended the day he went to prison. With his parole hearing approaching, he faces the grim reality that an ex-con can never work as a private eye. Yet one unsolved case continues to haunt him: the disappearance of Matilda Carver two decades ago.

Never one to follow the rules, Lane finds a lead - a mysterious farm community led by the enigmatic Samuel Karpathy. His farm attracts lost souls. People who want a more meaningful life. People who are hiding from their pasts. People with nowhere else to go.

But those who go to the farm seem to vanish without a trace.

Is it a commune? Is it a cult? Is it something even more dangerous? Lane goes undercover at the farm to find its dark secret - but will he himself be intoxicated by the prospect of a new life on the land?

Inspired by a real-life criminal case, VANISH is a nail-biting novel of suspense by the Number One-selling author of WAKE and RIPPER.

Praise for Shelley Burr's sensational novels:

'Compulsive, propulsive, addictive' New York Times

'Outstanding . . . A gripping mystery' The Guardian

'A yarn that feels so plausible and terrifying, it stays with you' The Australian Women's Weekly

'Shelley Burr is a bright new talent in Australian crime fiction' CHRIS HAMMER

'Stunning, masterfully written, thought-provoking and intense, it is Aussie noir at its finest' Sunday Express

Release date: April 30, 2025

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 384

Sample

LANE WORRIED AT the cuff of his shirt, rubbing it between the fingers and thumb of his other hand. All the prisoners had been issued new shirts that week, which were stiff and nasty and smelled peculiar. They’d probably saved Corrective Services ten per cent on a budget line item and won some white collar in Sydney a promotion or bonus. Meanwhile, it had made everyone in the Special Purpose Centre edgy and jumpy. In a place like this, the tiniest thing could get tempers rising. The prisoners were already bored and lonely and unhappy as a baseline – add a fresh irritant and the Tin became dry tinder waiting on a spark.

It had been a pleasant surprise when his sister Lynnie let him know she was planning a visit, but it left him uneasy. Since he’d moved to the Special Purpose Centre in Bowral, her visits had gradually dwindled to Christmas and birthdays. He understood – she was finishing a university degree in Canberra, and the round trip was a long one. Long enough that she needed to budget for petrol, a motel room and takeaway. He also knew that still made him one of the lucky few – statistically most prisoners received no visitors at all after the first year of their sentence.

‘This shirt is new,’ he told her, since that counted as news in his world. There was something he wished he could tell her, information he’d discovered that left him fizzing with the urge to share, but visits were monitored. He couldn’t tell her what he knew without telling her how he knew, and that would not end well for him.

‘It’s nice,’ she said.

‘It’s hideous,’ he said.

She grinned. ‘Like your own taste was any better.’

She had him there. Money had been tight during the years he’d spent raising her, turning him into a champion op-shopper. If a shirt was in good condition and fit his broad frame, he would buy it – style barely factored into the decision.

She folded her hands on the table between them. She’d had her nails done, he noticed – tidy little ovals painted pale pink. ‘I’m considering leaving my job so I can go full-time at uni. If I did that, I could graduate at the end of this year instead of next year.’

Lane tried to keep his face neutral. It hurt whenever she mentioned the compromises she’d had to make because of his decisions. He was in here, unable to support her the way he’d promised, and so instead of doing a full-time English degree like she’d wanted, she’d started an accounting cadetship – six years of part-time work and part-time study.

‘The main downside is that, if I did that, you wouldn’t be able to come to my graduation ceremony.’

‘If that’s the main downside, you should definitely do it,’ he said. ‘Just because I’m eligible for parole next year doesn’t mean I’ll get it. I might not be able to come next year either and you’ll have lost a year for nothing.’

‘You will get it,’ she said. ‘Your record is pristine.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘But there’s plenty of people who think my sentence was too lenient. If I get one of those on the parole board …’

‘There’s plenty who think you shouldn’t have served any time at all,’ she said, her voice heated.

‘They’re wrong,’ he said, trying to keep his tone mild. He pulled at his cuff again. Some of the men on his block hated them so much they’d taken to going about shirtless, even though it was winter, but Lane could never be comfortable like that.

‘Please don’t be defeatist,’ Lynnie said. ‘You can’t show the board you’re ready if you’re acting like you don’t think it will happen.’

Screw it. He needed to tell someone, but it was still too tenuous to get the governor’s hopes up. Still, after months of quiet, painstaking work, if he didn’t talk about it, he was going to end up developing the third man delusion – creating an imaginary friend because the pressure of being alone was too much.

‘I’ve got some news,’ he said.

It stung how completely Lynnie lit up at hearing something positive from him. ‘Oh?’

‘Do you remember what happened a couple of years ago, with Jan Henning-Klosner?’

Governor Patton Carver, who ran the prison in which Lane was currently a guest, had offered him a lifeline – a chance to work a case from prison. He’d asked Lane to try to befriend and surreptitiously interrogate Jan, also known as the Rainier Ripper, and prove that the Ripper’s unidentified female victim had been Matilda, Carver’s daughter, who had disappeared while backpacking nearly twenty years ago, during the period when Jan was active.

What Lane had actually learned from Jan had been beyond anything he or Carver could have imagined. It had brought a lot of answers to light, but not the one Carver had hoped for. Matilda was not one of Jan’s victims.

Once the dust settled, one painful fact remained: Matilda was still missing, and Carver was no closer to finding her.

The light in Lynnie’s face dimmed immediately. ‘It’s not something I would forget.’

‘I think I’ve got a lead on Matilda,’ Lane told her. He glanced over at the guard who was supervising the visiting room. Sweeney – a tall skinny man who’d only been working at the SPC for a few months – seemed focused on a prisoner who was talking to his girlfriend at the far end of the room, but Lane dropped his voice anyway. ‘She disappeared during her gap year, while working at a farm in the Kiewa Valley. I realised I was getting nowhere focusing on Matilda’s case. I was looking at the same information again and again and never seeing anything new. I needed to try from another direction. I started looking for other open Missing Persons cases from the region and –’

‘Looking how?’ Lynnie interrupted. ‘I know you’re not doing this on the LeapFrog laptop toys they give you in here.’

She was right. He’d complained to her often enough about how the tablets the prisoners had access to were more trouble than they were worth. If they weren’t glitching, they were out of batteries, and inmates weren’t even allowed to have the charging cable; guards took the devices away at night to charge. When they did work, the list of blacklisted sites was so long that the only topics he could research were how to file an appeal and how to do a self-check for herpes.

‘I can’t talk about that. It doesn’t matter how I found it.’

‘It very much does matter how you found it, Lane. You’re eligible for parole next year, and William says you’ve got a really good shot.’

‘William Magala? When were you talking to my lawyer?’

‘Don’t change the subject. Do you know how many infractions you can have on your record and still be granted parole? Zero! Zip! Duck egg!’ She affected a deliberately bad Eurovision judge accent. ‘Nul points!’

The guard looked their way, and both of them fell silent. Lynnie’s cheeks were flushed red, and Lane suspected he looked similar.

‘If you’ve found something, you can pursue it when you’re on the outside,’ Lynnie hissed. ‘She’s been missing for twenty years – what’s one more?’

‘When I’m on the outside, I’ll have a parole officer breathing down my neck. I’ll have a job to do and rent to pay.’

More than that. There was a risk that a particularly motivated parole officer who caught on to him searching for Matilda could spin it as him acting as a private investigator without a licence. It was a minor offence, punishable by a fine, but still enough to see his parole revoked. He needed to wait ten years after his conviction before he could even apply for a licence again, and the law had carve-outs to deny applications where it seemed prudent – such as in the case of a former private investigator who’d served time for kidnapping and murder.

He’d searched for loopholes and hit a brick wall every time. He could not act as a private investigator. He could not set himself up as a consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes-style, and support other investigators. He couldn’t even teach the training courses. He might be able to work in reception or office admin, answering phones and filing papers for another PI, but to be that close and not even able to do the dreariest and most dull investigative tasks would be worse than nothing.

Matilda Carver, however it turned out, was going to be his last case. He needed it.

‘You can live with me,’ Lynnie said. ‘I won’t charge you rent.’

‘I’m not going to sponge off my baby sister,’ Lane said. ‘But I don’t understand; when this came up last year you were all for it. You said it was the most alive I’d seemed in years.’

‘Look how that turned out,’ Lynnie said. ‘You made a serial killer your best friend.’

‘He wasn’t a serial killer. You need to kill three people to be considered –’

‘He killed more than zero people and you went to his funeral.’

‘Someone had to.’

She sighed. ‘I just don’t think you know where to draw the line. I’ve put so much on hold waiting for you to come out of here …’

‘What have you put on hold?’

‘Nothing.’ She put her hands over her face. ‘That’s not the point. It feels like I care more about your parole prospects than you do.’

‘Everything alright over here?’

The guard, Sweeney, had stepped up to their table without Lane noticing. He mentally replayed the last few seconds of their conversation, wondering what the man might have heard. It would have been bizarre, he decided, but not incriminating.

‘Everything’s fine, officer.’ Lynnie flashed him a smile. ‘You know how siblings squabble.’

Out of the corner of his eye, Lane saw the couple the guard had been watching originally. The other prisoner had his hand palm up on the table, and his girlfriend put her hand over his. She cut a glance their way and, seeing the guard now focused on Lane, let something drop out of her sleeve into her boyfriend’s palm.

Lane looked away quickly. Whatever it was would be trouble, whether they were caught or not, and what would spell the most trouble for Lane was if the prisoner clocked him witnessing the exchange and then the guards found contraband. Being labelled a snitch had landed him in sticky situations before, and he didn’t want to go through that again.

‘Have you ever thought about changing your name?’ Lynnie asked.

Lane backtracked through their conversation, trying to figure out how that connected to anything they’d said, and came up blank. Perhaps that question was the reason for her unexpected visit, and her nerves had got to her before she’d found a natural segue.

‘Occasionally,’ he admitted. His name, Lane Holland, was also their father’s. Lane Holland Senior had been a psychopath, and he had murdered at least two young girls, and probably more. Lane was in prison for killing him. ‘But it’s my name. I can’t imagine being called something else. And if I changed it, you and I wouldn’t share a family name anymore.’

Her expression tightened. Ah. Now they were getting to the heart of it.

‘I would understand if you wanted to change, though,’ he said.

Lynnie’s legal name was Evelyn Holland. It had never appeared in the press; she was a victim in their family’s history, not a perpetrator like him. But one of the trashier newspapers had let a sordid fact slip, which made her name easy to figure out: Evelyn had been named after one of their father’s murder victims.

‘If I was going to do it,’ she said tentatively, ‘it would make sense to get it sorted before I graduate. Then my degree would be issued in my new name.’

‘That’s smart,’ he said. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘Evangeline,’ she said. ‘So my friends who call me Eve don’t have to learn something new. And you can still call me Lynnie.’

‘I’ll call you whatever you want,’ he said. ‘Will you keep Holland? We could pick out a new family name together. Or maybe use Mum’s family name?’

The more he thought about that the more he liked it. A clean break.

Lynnie was silent for a beat, and then she took a deep breath, the way she had as a kid when she was trying to fight tears.

Oh shit. Of course Lynnie didn’t want to keep sharing a family name with him. She was about to start her real life, her brilliant career. Staying entangled with him wouldn’t be a clean break for her.

‘There’s something else I need to tell you,’ she said. ‘You know, if I don’t want to be going around with a different name on my degree …’

Oh.

Reflecting on what name she wanted. How she could suddenly afford to study full time. The beautiful manicure.

He was losing his touch.

He was abruptly, painfully, aware of how much time had passed in the real world. Part of him still thought of Lynnie as eighteen and barely out of high school. Twenty-three was still young for this, but not absurdly so.

‘I didn’t even know you were seriously dating anyone,’ he said.

‘It was casual for a long time,’ she confessed. ‘I just wanted to focus on school, and work, and have fun and make friends. I didn’t want any major life stuff to happen without you there.’

‘I would never ask you to put your life on hold,’ he said.

‘Oh, don’t be a drama queen,’ she said. ‘I mean, they say the brain hasn’t even finished forming until you turn twenty-five. It wasn’t a sacrifice. So, when I dated it was always casual. And most things fizzled out or blew up anyway. Then this one didn’t. And calling it casual began to feel like a pantomime around the time he added me to his car insurance as a second driver.’

‘I feel like you’re deliberately skirting around telling me anything about this guy. It is a guy, right?’ At her nod, he continued. ‘Does he live in Canberra? Where do you know him from?’ He grimaced. ‘He isn’t your boss, is he?’

‘No, he isn’t my boss – and he lives in Sydney.’

Sydney. That explained the hurry to graduate university, if she planned to move to be with him. Sydney was closer to the Special Purpose Centre than Canberra, so he might see her more often. And it solved a problem he’d been studiously ignoring: that if he did manage to get parole, he might not be allowed to live in Canberra while still under the control of the New South Wales corrections system. But he would never be able to afford to live in the country’s most expensive city, even without the dire employment prospects of a parolee.

‘He travels to Canberra a lot for work, though.’

‘Oh god, is he a politician?’

‘He’s a barrister. He appears at the High Court sometimes.’

A barrister who lived in Sydney but sometimes worked cases at the High Court. That wasn’t a fresh graduate she might have met in the Hancock Library or at a house party.

‘Lynnie,’ he said, trying to sound calm, ‘are you engaged to my lawyer?’

‘Maybe a little bit?’ She grimaced, and clapped her hands over her face. ‘Sorry, that makes no sense. I’m a lot engaged to him. Maybe a little bit was my go-to answer when people asked if we were seeing each other.’

That ached. There were people in Lynnie’s life who saw her every day, every week, and not always in the same room. They saw things, and put the pieces together, and asked. All he got was what she was ready to tell him.

And it made sense that she should fall for William Magala. He was good looking, well dressed, whip smart and making waves professionally – in no small part due to his role in Lane’s defence, a headline-grabbing case that had opened doors to more. Lynnie was smart too, and building her own career, and – to his very biased eyes – beautiful. Not to mention young.

‘There’s quite an age gap, isn’t there?’

‘Seven years,’ she scoffed. ‘I get the odd side-eye at his work functions, but in a decade no-one will notice.’

‘He’s always been very … generous with me when it comes to billing,’ Lane said. ‘He hasn’t –’

‘Are you seriously asking if I’ve been trading sexual favours for your legal work?’ Lynnie asked. Thankfully she looked more amused than offended. ‘No. And he’s not going to work for you for free after we get married.’

‘I’m not planning to commit any more crimes. Look, I’m just trying to …’ He didn’t know what he was trying to do, really. He was in no place to play the wise older brother sizing up her choice of partner. ‘You have to admit there’s a power differential.’

‘What’s going on here?’ a voice boomed across the visiting room, and Lane flinched. For a beat he thought the guard was yelling at them.

Instead, Sweeney walked up to the table of the couple Lane had noticed earlier. He thrust out his palm. ‘Give me what she handed you.’

Lane’s heart sank.

‘She didn’t give me nothing,’ the prisoner protested. ‘We were holding hands.’

‘I think you should step out,’ Lane said to Lynnie, dropping his voice low.

Lynnie nodded, looking regretful, and slipped out of her seat. This happened sometimes, and they’d learned a short visit was much better than trying to hang on while tensions in the room boiled over.

‘She passed you something, and you put it up your sleeve,’ Sweeney snapped. ‘Give it to me.’

‘He told you I didn’t give him anything,’ the girlfriend said. ‘Are you some kind of fucking re –’

‘Don’t!’ The man she was visiting slapped her forearm.

It succeeded in getting her to bite back the slur, but hitting a visitor was way out of line and Sweeney was on the prisoner like a shot, locking an arm around his neck and dragging him off the stool. ‘Hands off!’

Lane glanced over to the door and was relieved to see Lynnie on the other side, watching through the window with a pale face. He gave her a rueful wave, and a female guard ushered her out to the foyer.

He doubted this was how she’d always dreamed her engagement announcement would go.

Two more guards barrelled through the second door, the one that led to the main body of the prison. ‘Everybody out!’ the guard on the left shouted. ‘Visiting hours are over.’

‘Prisoners on the rear wall,’ the other one added, her voice quieter but firm.

Lane and the others lined up and then filed out of the room, grumbling among themselves. The offending prisoner was whisked away, presumably to be searched.

Instead of directing them back to their cells, the female guard marched the line through to the quadrangle, the SPC’s supposed recreation area, where other guards were bringing in the rest of the centre’s population, arranging the scowling men in neat rows like schoolchildren waiting for assembly.

A muster. Lane hoped it would be a brief exercise, a flexing of the guards’ power to bring them all to heel before the incident in the visiting room could set off a chain reaction.

The minutes dragged on, turning into fifteen, then thirty, then a full hour while the men stood in their lines and the guards took occasional headcounts and conferred among themselves. Sounds floated in, audible even through the thick walls. Clangs and thumps and the low groan of the hinges of heavy doors.

They were tossing the whole place. Whatever that prisoner had slipped up his sleeve must have been bad, because from the sound of it every cell was being searched. All Lane could do was stand in his assigned spot, clench his fists and wait, hoping they wouldn’t find what he had hidden and knowing they would.

IT WAS SWEENEY who came to escort Lane to the governor’s office. The guard walked silently beside him, eyes ahead, and so Lane was free to practise maintaining a neutral expression. Jaw relaxed. Eyebrows down. Mouth in a soft line.

Governor Patton Carver was seated behind his broad desk. The previous times Lane had been in this office the desk had been decorated with the clutter of ordinary life: family photos, stationery, a lunchbox and cutlery. Today it had been cleared off, so the only three items on the desk stood out. A small stack of papers covered in Lane’s handwriting, a torn A5 envelope and a mobile phone.

Lane didn’t let his gaze rest on them. Instead, he focused on Carver’s face, keeping his lips pressed gently together. The biggest possible mistake would be to start speaking unprompted. Blustering denials, pretending to be confused about what was going on, making excuses or casting blame elsewhere – no matter what he said, Carver could use it to let him walk himself into a trap.

‘Sweeney, you can go,’ Carver said, making no effort to acknowledge Lane.

The guard nodded and stepped out, pulling the door closed behind him. Lane remained standing. Jaw relaxed. Eyebrows down. Mouth in a soft line.

Carver waited until a full minute had ticked by on the clock on the wall. Then he stood, walked to the door, and opened it a crack to look out. Satisfied that Sweeney had actually left, he closed it again and turned the lock.

‘Sit, Holland,’ he said, returning to his own seat.

Lane sat in the chair opposite Carver. He didn’t slouch into it, nor did he sit bolt upright. Imagining himself in a front-row seat at a theatre, he tried to look respectful and interested but not nervous.

‘What the fuck is this?’ Carver pointed at the phone.

Lane looked at it properly for the first time. Of course, he knew exactly what it was: a black Samsung – an older model but decently functional. He was probably its third or fourth owner; he hadn’t been the one to smuggle it into the Special Purpose Centre but had received it from another prisoner. Whatever happened, he needed to avoid naming that man. If Lane turned someone in for smuggling, he’d have a knife in his kidneys before breakfast.

When not in use, he’d kept the phone hidden in the envelope, tucked away with his legal papers from Magala. Lane kept himself out of trouble and went out of his way to avoid annoying the guards, so that was a reasonably safe place to keep it. Guards didn’t mess with those papers without a good reason. But today they’d had a good reason.

‘Looks like a phone, sir,’ Lane said.

Lane’s relationship with Carver was complicated. For his first few months in the centre, Carver had been a distant figure, a signature on the bottom of forms. Then he had come to Lane with the bizarre proposal that Lane go undercover in the medical unit to elicit a confession from fellow inmate Jan Henning-Klosner.

In the two years since then, their relationship had returned to an uneasy distance. Lane already found it difficult to persuade other prisoners to leave him alone; because he’d once made his living solving crimes and turning people in to the police for rewards, a lot of them assumed he would be willing to do the same thing from the inside if they let anything incriminating slip. For that reason, he wasn’t willing to be Carver’s pet priva. . .