You don't want Jane turning hunter on you . . .

books:


	• Vanishing Act (Jane Whitfield Novel) Thomas Perry Fawcett, 1996 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 35 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Thomas Perry does it again

Perry manages to continiue to surprise you in the different ways he has Jane do some very tricky things to keep her friend and herself alive. Jane uses all her innate wisdom and makes use of most of her contacts to make everything turn out for the best.

You don't want Jane turning hunter on you . . .

Jane Whitefield, half-Seneca, all original, is a "guide" -- and not in the spiritual sense, either. She runs a sort of private Witness Protection Program, helping deserving individuals who are on the run to drop out of the world. Many of them are the wives of powerful and abusive men, or targets of gangland violence they don't deserve. John Felker is an ex-cop turned accountant who is being set up for reasons unknown by persons unknown, and he known enough about the way things work to understand that there's no way he's ever going to prove his innocence. He found out about Jane from one of her previous "clients" (though she doesn't actually charge for her services) and has come to her for help. She gets him squared away, after an interlude on a reservation in Canada (which is quite fascinating). But she's barely returned home when things begin to happen that make it clear she's made a dreadful error in judgment. Perry has done a great deal of research for this unusually, highly original novel and he develops his characters very well indeed. The closing section, which is brilliant and gripping, is set in the North Woods, and could have taken place two centuries ago. A marvelous book.

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A wonderful series!

Vanishing Act is the first in a series of five books about Jane Whitefield, an Indian guide who will take someone from where there are people who want to kill them -- to where they are safe. She provides people with a new identity and a new life. John Felker is looking for just that. He is a former cop turned accountant who is being set up as an embezzler. Someone is skimming money from the accounting firm's customers and depositing it into an account in John's name. There is also an open contract on his life, so he needs to disappear.

The book is written in two distinctly separate parts. The first part is about how Jane makes someone disappear. We follow Jane and John cross country as they are being chased by the men who are after John. We are introduced to people along the way who help make their escape possible by providing safe places to stay or creating fake documentation or getting them transportation. When Jane finally gets John safe, the story takes a new twist. The people we have met along their journey are being murdered. Someone has been tracking them and Jane fears for John's safety. She has to go back to save him before the killers find him too.

The Native American culture and history were very interesting. Jane uses her training and skills in tracking and in creating weapons from items she finds in the woods. I thought of a few questions along the way that I wanted answers to and was a bit disappointed when those answers, found late in the book, would have cleared everything up quite early. Surely Jane is better at this than I am and should have asked them herself. But then we wouldn't have had a story, right?

Armchair Interviews says: Definitely pick Vanishing Act and up the next one in this unique series.

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Compelling, textured thriller in Adirondacks

While learning some interesting facts ("Adirondacks" is Iroquois for "bark-eaters," a derogatory term for ineffective hunters, and George Washington ordered assorted massacres of Indian villages), I found this novel consistently engaging. The reviews suggesting the heroine's "gullibility" forget the difference between reading a novel and living an experience. Perry isn't interested in tricking his readers, but inviting them to see and experience the world as his heroine does. All in all, she's quicker to figure out the shape of a complex story than that reviewer would have been, and this novel's merits don't depend on "figuring it out" anyway. If a mythic heroince can be credible, this one is.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

"A CHALLENGING AND SATISFYING THRILLER. . .[WITH] MANY SURPRISING TWISTS. "
--The New York Times
Jane Whitefield is a Native American guide who leads people out of the wilderness--not the tree-filled variety but the kind created by enemies who want you dead. She is in the one-woman business of helping the desperate disappear. Thanks to her membership in the Wolf Clan of the Seneca tribe, she can fool any pursuer, cover any trail, and then provide her clients with new identities, complete with authentic paperwork. Jane knows all the tricks, ancient and modern; in fact, she has invented several of them herself.
So she is only mildly surprised to find an intruder waiting for her when she returns home one day. An ex-cop suspected of embezzling, John Felker wants Jane to do for him what she did for his buddy Harry Kemple: make him vanish. But as Jane opens a door out of the world for Felker, she walks into a trap that will take all her heritage and cunning to escape....
"Thomas Perry keeps pulling fresh ideas and original characters out of thin air. The strong-willed heroine he introduces in Vanishing Act rates as one of his most singular creations."
--The New York Times Book Review
ONE THRILLER THAT MUST BE READ . . . .Perry has created his most complex and compelling protagonist."
--San Francisco Examiner

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