10. The Vanishing Season by Joanna Schaffhausen

#1 Ellery Hathaway

listened on Libby

274 pgs. (8:58)

2017
Adult mystery/thriller
Finished 3/1/2025
Goodreads rating: 3.81
My rating: 4
Setting: contemporary small town central Massachusetts

My comments: Ellery had been the victim of a serial killer, saved in the nick of time by a young FBI agent named Agent Reed Markham. Years later she's a top in a small Massachusetts town where no one knows her identity.  However, for the past three years she's been receiving ominous anonymous birthday cards, and there has been three annual disappearances, all at the beginning of the month of July.  She knows something is awry.  So she gets in touch with that FBI agent from fourteen years ago and more problems ensue.  This is good storytelling and kept me quite attentive.  Sick minds.  Very sick minds. A very bad guy and his equally-as-bad copycat. 

    Note:  Abrupt ending

    Another note:  I never really liked or trusted the protagonist, I'm not sure why.....

Goodreads:  Ellery Hathaway knows a thing or two about serial killers, but not through her police training. She's an officer in sleepy Woodbury, MA, where a bicycle theft still makes the newspapers. No one there knows she was once victim number seventeen in the grisly story of serial killer Francis Michael Coben. The only one who lived.

When three people disappear from her town in three years―all around her birthday―Ellery fears someone knows her secret. Someone very dangerous. Her superiors dismiss her concerns, but Ellery knows the vanishing season is coming and anyone could be next. She contacts the one man she knows will believe her: the FBI agent who saved her from a killer all those years ago.

Agent Reed Markham made his name and fame on the back of the Coben case, but his fortunes have since turned. His marriage is in shambles, his bosses think he's washed up, and worst of all, he blew a major investigation. When Ellery calls him, he can’t help but wonder: sure, he rescued her, but was she ever truly saved? His greatest triumph is Ellery’s waking nightmare, and now both of them are about to be sucked into the past, back to the case that made them...with a killer who can't let go.