“Watch Her Vanish” starts out that way, and it’s unfortunate, because once the story gets going, it moves along rapidly, people start acting like normal adults, and there’s a really good serial killer mystery in there, with a logical, nicely convoluted plotline and lots of suspense.

The writing is for the most part professional and well-edited. Dark symbolism smoothly envelops the setting with fog, rain, darkness, deserted buildings, remote country roads and evil. Everything you could wish for in a good read.

Unfortunately, this author slips every once in a while into the over-used errors of weaker genres: creating suspense by blatantly not telling us something; overusing cliff-hangers; manipulating characters to keep conflict going. The sort of flaw that reminds us that there is an author manipulating our emotions.

Otherwise a good story, especially for people who like a lot of human interaction in their murder mysteries.

(4 / 5)