At her summer job at Bottomrock Lake, Teddy meets the new lifeguard, Toby – the last person to see her twin sister, Izzy, alive before she disappeared the year before. Izzy’s body has never been found and her passport has disappeared. Teddy has a lot of questions about what happened that night. How could an aspiring Olympic swimmer disappear during a lake swim? Could Toby be lying about what happened that night? Teddy is determined to find out. Toby is the only one who can help her unravel the truth.
Written solely from Teddy’s point of view we journey through her grief and confusion as she realises her twin hasn’t shared some of the most important parts of her life with her. Guilt and anger give way to doubt and acceptance. Teddy sometimes speaks to Izzy, addressing her in the first person, which feels both intimate and jarring in patches. The pacing suffers slightly from being slow at the start to switching to a gallop in the last third of the book.
While this is a mystery story, it is also a story of grief and self discovery. Teddy, her parents and friends are all trying to rebuild their lives, their relationships and themselves. Neeves handles the topics of loss, mental health and death sensitively and subtly. The characters are well rounded and keep the reader interested. After You Vanished is a satisfying, quiet mystery about grief and navigating through it.
Patricia Hayes
After You Vanished
E.A. Neeves
Hyperion, 2023
Hardback, £16.99
ISBN 9781368092708
Blending elements of Japanese and European folklore, Skye brings us a familiar and rounded civilisation in Kichona. Each chapter alternates between young and old characters, giving us a wide view of the world. At times this distracts from the story and flattens the pacing, especially when a character’s viewpoint only appears two or three times, and the reader is left wondering what their purpose is. The use of magic veers between being straight forward spells (taiga magic) and manipulating the environment (ryo magic), accentuating the differences between the two groups of fighters and making the eventual confrontation feel a little one sided. Though, as this is book one in the series this is undoubtedly deliberate. This is a story of love, loyalty and revenge and it is the conflict in the main characters that drives it forward, leaving us wanting to discover more about them as they discover themselves. 
