Horror Fiction: The Vanishing Season by Dot Hutchison

The adventure that began in 2016 with The Butterfly Garden now comes to an end. The Vanishing Season is the fourth and final installment in Dot Hutchison's The Collector Series. It has been a wild ride, and the conclusion will certainly be as thrilling and fascinating as the previous three books.

The Situation: Eliza Sterling has a job she loves, despite what it forces her to deal with. She even broke off an engagement to continue to work, which also caused a considerable rift between herself and her mother. As one of the newer(ish) agents with the FBI in the Crimes Against Children division, Eliza regularly comes face to face with some of the most gruesome, and also heartbreaking, crimes against innocent children. Just a few years before, someone was "rescuing" children from their parents by leaving them scared and frightened on the doorstep a fellow agent, but only after forcing them to witness their parents being brutally murdered. As terrible as it can be, Eliza could not imagine doing anything else, or with any other team. And when a call comes in that a little girl has been kidnapped on her way home from school, it is more or less another day on the job, until an unsettling connection is made to a cold case, and one of their own.

The Problem: Eight year-old Brooklyn Mercer has seemingly vanished on they way home from school. She usually walks home from school with her best friend, but she was sick that day. And due to conflicting schedules and crossed wires, Brooklyn's parents neglect to make alternate plans. Now an entire community is searching for the little blonde-haired blue-eyed girl, who coincidentally looks like a child-sized version of Eliza. With her own blue eyes and blonde curls, pretty much everyone is visibly startled after taking one glance at the agent. It is these physical characteristics that will link Brooklyn's disappearance with that of another blonde-haired blue-eyed girl a few years earlier, and in a different location. And yet another one a couple years before that, in yet another location. And another, and another, until the Bureau has gone over 30 years into the past. Not only does this bring the team closer to finding Brooklyn, but also to finding out what happened to Detective Brandon Eddison's sister Faith, who is on the list of girls who went missing.

Genre, Themes, History: This is a horror/thriller novel set in the modern day US. Following in the tradition of the previous three books, this one has switched to yet another viewpoint, this time following Eliza Sterling. It has been a few years now since she has joined the team, and she fits in well. She considers Mercedes to be more like a sister than a coworker; she feels like yet another stray that has been adopted by Victor and his wonderful family; and she has been dating Brandon for a couple of years now. The closeness of the team certainly allows them to work well together, but things get awkward quickly when one of them has a personal connection to a case, and the agents all have personal connections to each other. With this book, Hutchison brings to the forefront a cold case that she introduced in the The Butterfly Garden. Everything is coming together, and the characters that readers have gotten to know over the last four years make a final appearance as they all rally around one of their own.

My Verdict: While it does lack the intensity that set The Butterfly Garden apart from so many other books in its genre, at least for me, this is still an appropriate and fitting final novel in what has been one of my favorite book series going today. There is once again a killer on the loose, one that has been active for decades, and while there is plenty of focus on that, there is even more focus on the relationships between the characters: how they work together; why they work together; and what needs to happen when a little girl goes missing, and she is only one in a long string that spans over 30 years. It makes sense to end the series with a case that has plagued and tormented one of the main characters. And while the overall forcefulness has been paired down, it is at least in the interest of focusing on closure. 

Favorite Moment: When it is finally acknowledged how weird it is that Eliza looks like an older version of Eddison's missing sister.

Favorite Character: Hard to say really. Since this is the culmination of a series, there are characters coming out of the woodwork, and I have enjoyed the majority of them. So I suppose I will pick Victor Hanoverian, who serves as the de facto father to all of them. He takes care of his team, as well as quite a few of the victims the team has gotten to know over the years. When it is clear someone is not taking care of themselves, they ultimately have to answer to him, and his mother.

Recommended Reading: My favorite of the series is still The Roses of May. As for books outside of The Collector Series, I recommend Sadie by Courtney Summers.