Vanished

Chris Niles

Pan Macmillan £6.99

Rel: Feb 2004

Reviewed by Sarah Weinman

Remember high school? For many folks, that question means digging up some unpleasant memories and revisiting past torments and social hierarchies. But for others, it was the best time of their lives, something to hold on to years, if not decades later. But for those in the misfit category, usually they discover something better: college. After that, they can make something of themselves. Then there’s Sophie Graham, the star of Chris Niles’ fifth novel, Vanished. A struggling actress working at a wannabe upscale bar in New York, thirtysomething Sophie has been floating from idea to idea, job to job, never quite succeeding at anything. It’s certainly not the desired career path for alumni of the prestigious boarding school she attended, where she was tormented on a near-regular basis by the prettier, more popular girls in her class.

When Electra Jordan, queen of the high school she-bitches, shows up with her family at the bar while Sophie’s on duty, she’s mortified, angry, and a little scared. How can she measure up to Electra’s gorgeousness, successful career and stylish look? Rather than look bad and ashamed at her life’s misdirection, Sophie lies that she’s a private investigator. It’s a throwaway line, something she forgets about completely. But a few months later, just as Sophie’s about to be laid off, the lie comes back to haunt her. Electra Jordan has disappeared, and her father wants to know what happened-and hires Sophie to look for her. Reveal the truth, or take the case? A five thousand dollar retainer makes the choice all too simple, but Sophie hasn’t a clue how to go about being a PI. With the help of her friends, a sardonic Internet café manager, and her eccentric neighbors, Sophie dives into Electra’s world, trying to put the pieces together. And if it means staying in Electra’s wonderfully minimalist apartment, trying on her clothes, and buying expensive new things, well, it’s all for investigative purposes, right? Naturally, the more questions Sophie asks and the more half-truths and lies she uncovers, the more she realizes there actually is something rotten going on-and that it might be up to her to save the life of the woman she hates the most.

The overriding theme of Vanished is that nothing is as it seems at face value. Sophie pretends to be a private investigator, but manages to be smarter and less clumsy at it than many fictional gumshoes. Her whole life is based on overcoming the torments of adolescence-Electra’s in particular-but circumstances force her to re-examine those events and find that she never knew what her nemesis was truly like, then and now. And finally, though Chris Niles’ breezy, seemingly effortless prose paints a wonderfully superficial portrait of the idiosyncratic denizens of New York, it’s a façade to skewer those same superficialities and point to something altogether deeper: the fraying bonds of friendship, family, and loved ones. Though Vanished works awfully well as a satire of the PI genre, Niles, who lampooned serial killers to great effect in 2001’s Hell’s Kitchen, has grander aims, and in those, she succeeds in wonderfully wicked fashion. There’s nobody quite like Chris Niles in the mystery world-and long may she subject the genre to her merciless scrutiny.

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