Vanishing Act by Thomas Perry

Vanishing Act by Thomas Perry is the first of seven novels about the protagonist, Jane Whitefield. (I previously unfavorably reviewed the book he co-wrote with Clive Cussler called “The Tombs.”) It’s unusual for my wife’s book groups to read a crime novel, so that’s where the lukewarm recommendation came from for this book. Whitefield is a Seneca Indian who moves easily in and out of Indian circles, and her cause in life is to help people drop off the grid. She’s adept at making virile men look inadequate, which is perhaps what this story was doing in a women’s book group. She refers to herself as “a guide,” and in an understated way that is consistent with many of our favorite books which have strong male heroes, Whitefield said, “Sometimes people need help. I sometimes give it to them.”

In this novel one of the men she helped disappear was Harry Kemple, and he ended up dead, so he had not disappeared as well as Whitefield thought. Another man, John Felker, who had also sought her out to help him disappear was merely using her to find Kemple. It was Felker who took out Kemple, so then Whitefield pursued Kemple with the intent to kill him, since she knew he would be after her. The pursuit of these two took the reader into various Indian tribes, their histories, and then into the North Woods for a remarkably rugged adventure. Jane Whitefield is a combination of Steve Hamilton’s Alex McKnight and C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett. That is high praise to be linked to those two authors.

My response to this is better than just lukewarm, but I’m not ready to elevate Perry to power rotation status. I’ll read the second book in the series at some point, but at the moment, my reading queue is long, so I’ll dive into that first before I work my way back to Perry’s Ms. Whitefield.