Fans of Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone series will appreciate that after the heart-break McCone underwent during The Dangerous Hour, that Muller is letting McCone enjoy a little happiness. The Vanishing Point opens with McCone’s wedding reception. She and Hy Ripinsky have returned from their spur-of-the-moment trip to Vegas firmly wed. They fly back to find a surprise party waiting for them to usher them into married life. Given that both of them are independent workaholics, it is then appropriate that during the reception, Sharon gets approached with a job request. McCone and her agency began investigating the 20-year-old disappearance of a wife and mother. The daughter has become increasingly agitated and feels she need to know what happened to her mother. But digging up old history gets someone riled up. Muller’s latest offering once again showcases the efficiency of McCone’s entire agency. This isn’t a lone private investigator who single-handedly manages to solve the case, track down the villain, and get in a gunfight. She draws upon the resources of a diverse group of people with a variety of talents. Granted, this means there are a lot of characters—each with their own families and myriad relationships. Sometimes it can get confusing to track all of these characters but for the most part they are distinctly drawn and the reader can quickly place them. This does give an advantage to long-time readers of the series as they’ll be far more intimate with the backgrounds of the large number of recurring characters. However, Muller does provide enough information so that the newcomer to the series is not lost. McCone also expresses some pretty hard-line attitudes about suicide and abandonment in this book. They’re not comfortable views and more than one reader might find it off-putting. It is these attitudes, though, that help to drive McCone throughout this investigation as she tries to determine what happened to her client’s mother. Vanishing Point also gives fans of the series their first look at the married life of Hy and Sharon. For anyone who was worried that they would settle into a domesticity that would alienate them from the adventures that make the mysteries fast-paced reading, have no fear. They are far from a conventional couple. Neither of them get much of a honeymoon as they are both pulled away by career demands almost immediately, able to share only a few hours here and there. While Hy’s career may be primarily a device to keep him from overly interfering with the plot line (and providing the occasional job for McCone), enough tantalizing hints are dropped that one almost wishes Muller would start another series covering Hy’s adventures. With the July 10, 2006 publication of Vanishing Point, Muller is a year away from the 30th anniversary of McCone’s first appearance. With her marriage, McCone is beginning a new chapter of her life and the series seems far from over. More than a decade after Muller won the Private Eye Writer’s of America Lifetime Achievement Award, she continues to prove that her achievements are still piling up.
1.5 STARS"In the latest installment in this critically acclaimed series, Sharon McCone is hired to investigate one of San Luis Obispo County's most puzzling cold cases. A generation ago, Laurel Greenwood, a housewife and artist, inexplicably vanished, leaving her young daughter alone. Now, new evidence suggests that the missing woman may have led a strange double life. But before McCone can penetrate the tangled mystery, she must first solve a second disappearance--that of her client, the now grown daughter of Laurel Greenwood. The case, which forces Sharon to explore the darker sides of two marriages, comes uncomfortably close on the heels of her own marriage to Hy Ripinsky, and she begins to doubt the wisdom of her impulsive trip to the Reno wedding chapel" (From Amazon)I did not like it...but could be due to the fact it I started in the middle of the series :(
What do You think about Vanishing Point (2006)?
This is Muller's 27th Sharon McCone mystery - formulaic, to be sure (I've read most, if not all). Unlike a lot of other series, though, the character ages and develops as we read the series. McCone was a younk kid fresh out of the SFFD, struggling to learn the PI business. Now she's a successful owner of a good-size firm, with other people involved in the cases. If you haven't read the others in the series, you might feed lost in all the side characters.That said, this was a good, quick read - does't take a lot of thought, and somewhat predictable, but do we all want to not know "whodunit" til the last page, or are we looking for a little adventure through the eyes of an old friend?
—Phil
This is the first Sharon McCone mystery that I have read. Perhaps if I had read others before this one, I would feel closer to the characters. As it is, the character of Sharon McCone, her husband, and her staff felt very one-dimensional. Sharon has no real personality; nothing about her stands out as being a unique voice. Poirot has his arrogance and fastidiousness, Elvis Cole has his humorous outlook on life. There's something about the view these detectives have on the world that make them interesting to read about. Sharon comes off as a dud. There's no real conflict in her personal life. In this novel, she has just returned from marrying her long-term boyfriend, Hy, with whom she owns three homes. She also spends a lot of time flying (yes, flying not driving like a regular person) her personal plane to the locations her investigations leads her. The extreme amount of flying (Hy flies too while he works) distracted me from the plot because all I could think about was how expensive it must be to pay for all the fuel and upkeep on the plane. Her customers must get overcharged a lot to cover those expenses. She also has a lot of people working for her that she gets help from over the course of the story. None of these characters really stand out.The mystery surrounds a search for a missing woman who abandoned two small children and disappeared many years ago. There's a parallel tale involving one of the daughters who follows her mother's footsteps and disappears also. As the search for the missing mother plays out, you get the idea that the only reason why she's been missing for so long is that no one bothered to look for her.Overall the book was okay, but it does not make me what to read other McCone mysteries.
—Heather
Vanishing Point, by Marcia Muller, book borrowed from Library for the Blind but it is available through audible.com.We begin this book with the wedding party of Hai and Sharon who have finally gotten married. But Sharon’s former partner, Rae, comes to her with a cold case from a dear friend. Jennifer’s mother disappeared 22 years ago. No one ever found a body or found out what happened to her. As Sharon begins investigating this case with Jennifer’s husband, Mark, saying no expense will be spared, Jennifer too disappears. Sharon and her employees must track down Jennifer, and then try to find her mother, if she’s still alive. As more facts become known, Jennifer and her sister Terri are in for disillusionment about both parents. Muller is back on track again. This is a very good book.
—Kathleen Hagen
