Review: The Vanishing Place, by Zoe Rankin

On the South Island's West Coast near the Roaring Billy River, surrounded by podocarp forest and silence, is the tiny settlement of Koraha. Most people who come here do not venture far beyond the town, as there have long been loud whisperings of bad deeds and lost souls in the surrounding bush. Around twenty years ago a family was known to have lived in this wilderness, isolated in action and mind. Of what became of them, there is only conjecture. 

Until one day when a young girl, traumatised and blood-smeared, flees out of the bush and into the On the Spot dairy. She’s the spitting image of a member of the bush family who has not been seen in twenty years.The girl is called Anya, and she will not speak. She is afraid and half-feral, ready to take off back into the bush, into the heart of insidiousness.

In The Vanishing Place, where monsters in human form loom with the river dripping from their clothes, with uncanny parallels to the Marokopa bush family, Scottish-born Zoe Rankin takes us into a world consumed by control and subjugation. However, in a step further along from the real-life case, this fictional one involves multiple murders. The first victim has been left to rot in the elements, bearing symbolic cuts. The victim has been deeply marked with a crucifix. And ghostly figures are still lurking in the bush.

Effie is now in her 30s, newly returned from remote life in the village of Carbost on the Isle of Skye. Yet she was once a bush child. Her escape at 15 is known only by her childhood friend, now the community constable of Koraha, Lewis. She too has trained as a police officer, with the drive for solutions in her blood. Her ongoing psychological recovery and riddance of shame depends on delving into the victimhood and possible redemption of others. The past, with its bush memories, is always there, ‘lapping at her shins’.

Through the third person narrative, the reader is privy to a highly detailed contemporary crime case. Effie and Lewis, working with the girl, drive this narrative, which is full of false trails, sabotage, and ill deeds. The forest has been a site of unimagined violence, and the huts are their family's special secret. Many of the secondary characters (villains, victims, or fellow citizens) we learn about by hearsay only, as almost mythical figures from the bush mists of the past. Often these very characters are likewise trying to grasp the true circumstances. A few we meet along the way, as the narrative swaps between a 2025 setting and the early 2000s. Later there is an additional time frame. Though the prose often becomes cliched and emotive, Rankin successfully propels the plot and its suspense via this frequent time swapping.

From the earlier era, with the main characters in their adolescence, the reader gains most of their orientation and understanding of the story’s motivations. And as it goes on, the plot becomes far too complex. This is an ambitious landscape of characters and their overall motivations are not fully unpacked. For the reader it can be very difficult to grasp the overall picture.

Nonetheless, Rankin succeeds in taking us deep into a horrendous world full of brainwashing, false prophets, and Jekyll and Hydes. The structure and character development are strong points in this novel and due to a New Zealand focus, and the current relevance, The Vanishing Place will intrigue. Effie knows all too well about generations breeding generations of the same, and she sums up the hopelessness when she opines that ‘even the best detectives can't catch ghosts’.