Book Talk: Thomas Perry, ‘Vanishing Act’

I’ve been asked why I generally review crime/mystery/ suspense/thriller-type novels. I suppose that my most direct answer is that I enjoy the genre. But these books are also a break from the books that I needed to read during my professional life. Most of those were in the fields of sociology and psychology, although I also taught a class titled “Sociology through Literature,” which was based on “modern classics.”

This generation of YA (Young Adult) books also fascinates me because they are so different from the YA books of my generation (J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye or Max Shulman, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis). So, basically, the books that I choose are ones that I can enjoy without worrying about what lesson I should glean from the hundreds of pages of prose.

A case in point is Thomas Perry’s “Vanishing Act” (1995, 351 pages in paperback format). I read my first Perry book in the 1980s, The Butcher’s Boy. It won the Edgar Award for best mystery novel. Since then, I’ve read several more of his tales, but I only recently learned that he’d written a series of books between 1995 and 2021 about a Seneca woman who helps people to disappear. The first book, the above-mentioned Vanishing Act, introduces readers to Jane Whitefield.