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Review

Vanishing Act

By Thomas Perry

289 pages, $29.95 (hc.)

Random House

Jane Whitefield helps people disappear. Women fleeing abusive spouses, and people who, through a twist of fate, find living their old lives may prove fatal, turn to Jane for her guiding skills. She helps them examine the possibilities of starting a new life and concoct a "past" that will support them in their new identities, then she guides them through their escape.

Jane enters her house one day to find John Felker, a handsome ex-cop who left the force in pursuit of an ordinary life. He became an accountant only to discover after several years in his new profession that he was being framed for embezzling client's funds. To stick around and try to clear his name is suicidal, as hit men pursue him.

To be convicted and sent to jail means death. Someone has put an open contract on his life out in the prison system. He found Jane through an old mutual friend, Harry, who was fleeing the mob when Jane helped him disappear five years earlier.

"He knew I was in trouble. He told me that if I needed to disappear, there was a door out of the world. He told me that this is where it is," John says.

John knows Harry's story almost word-for-word and Jane agrees to help him. The two start out on a harrowing journey that takes them from upstate New York to the Six Nations Reserve on the Grand River, then west to Vancouver where Jane bids a permanent farewell to John Felker. But somewhere along the way Jane made a decision to ignore her inherent cautious nature and fell in love with the fleeing man. Her farewell was a reluctant one and the two make tentative plans to meet in a year or so, after John is settled in his new life.

When she arrives home in New York, she discovers that her old friend Harry has been killed in a mob-style murder. Fearing for John's life, she heads to his new home to find he never arrived.

Author Thomas Perry, winner of the Edgar award by the Mystery Writers of America for his 1982 novel The Butcher's Boy has crafted a taut, suspenseful work with Vanishing Act. Jane is a heroine unlike any other in modern mysteries. Half-Seneca, she finds the way to survive is to honor her ancestors and rely on the Indian way of seeing the world.

She has her own code of justice and will not accept being the cause of an innocent person's death. Faced with an implacable and ruthless enemy, she draws on the ancient knowledge she learned at the hands of her Seneca family. Instead of giving in to the panic of a lost white girl in the woods, she looks around herself and discovers the means of survival.

Living through Jane's experiences in Vanishing Act would make most people long for a mundane life. She emerges a little older, a lot wiser but surprisingly lacking in bitterness. Rather than considering giving up her occupation as a "guide", she simply moves on to the next client. After all, the steam of people who need her help never seem to end, and as her ancestors learned hundreds of years ago, peace and life is a far better choice than war and death.