A young girl, starving and covered with blood, turns up in a general store in a remote village deep in New Zealand. She blurts out her name- Anya – but refuses to say anyting else. A shocking murder in the New Zealand bush and the witness who looks all too familiar draws a woman back to the very place she swore she’d never return to in this breakneck debut thriller. The phone rings for Effie, a police officer who fled that very village under terrifying circumstances 17 years earlier and is now in Scotland. An old friend, Lewis, is on the line with some haunting news: The girl, he says, looks like Effie, and it’s a good bet they’re from the same blighted family.

So Effie is feeling compelled to return home to face up to the unsettling events of her own childhood? Rankin skilfully finds new ways to highlight this familiar scenario, pulling us back to harrowing events of 2001, and then forward to 2025, as present-day Effie pieces together how her imperfect memories- a mother who died young, a violent father, a life off the grid- are connected to Anya’s plight.

Growing up with her younger siblings I the unforgiving New Zealand bush, Effie believed their parents had cut them off from civilisation because they loved Nature. She never suspected that their reasons might be more menacing. After witnessing a terrifying episode of violence, she escaped the wilderness to forge a life for herself halfway across the globe. Now when she learns the only witness to a murder is a little girl who looks just like her. Lapses of memory, that people are capable of both unspeakable cruelty and unbelievable heroism and that the reader should not jump into conclusions about the characters too soon.  Ranking writes “The bush had never left her, it had Iain dormant in her core, no matter how deep she’d buried it”. Effie must face her greatest fears once more.

The Vanishing Place by Zoë Rankin, Berkley$30, 384 pages.