The Girl Who Wasn’t There

Vincent Zandri

Oceanview Publishing (OCT 13) Hardcover $26.95 (304pp), 978-1-60809-396-0

Set in Lake Placid, the sharp-minded thriller The Girl Who Wasn’t There plays with expectations about whom to trust.

Sydney had dreams of being a doctor, and he had the smarts to make it happen. Instead, he became the bagman for one of New York’s most successful criminal underlords, Mickey Rabuffo. Mickey trusted Sydney like a son, and so Sydney learned where Mickey kept his money.

But Sydney’s work for Mickey landed him in prison. He turned state’s evidence and was just paroled. When Sydney’s daughter goes missing, there are a lot of people who might be to blame. But the police officers and detectives who ought to help, aren’t. It’s hard for Sydney to know where to turn, and thoughts of Mickey’s hidden money start to grow.

Further, Sydney is not easy prey as people might expect: he learned his lessons well, and he’s much more formidable than he appears. While prison always changes a person, what it did to Sydney was unanticipated. Behind bars, he learned about pain: how to take it, and how to inflict it with surgical precision. His proto-doctor mind can calculate just how to inflict the most pain and damage to those who hunt his family, and to their worlds.

The book’s tight writing style stares straight forward from Syndey’s perspective. He is unflinching, and he sees the world as it is, including all of its murky moral darkness and relational complexity. If Sydney changed in prison, so has the world since he entered it; Sydney is smart enough to realize this, and he knows just what to do about it.

Vincent Zandri’s tight-fisted triller throws a gut punch at those who would separate a man from his family.