VANISHING BODIES

In Mikheyev’s SF thriller, a man with miraculous abilities is hunted by a mysterious villain.

In a slam-bang opening scene, Miss Anne-Marie Reneux is having her usual breakfast at her favorite New York City cafe when a naked young man runs straight to her table. She jolts back, spilling the contents of her purse (including her handgun), but he only seems to want to look at her copy of the New York Times. He scans the obituaries, finds one for Aristotle Zurr-McIntyre, abruptly grabs her gun, shoots himself in the head, and then vanishes. Miss Reneux faints, and the novel is off to the races. Aristotle Zurr-McIntyre’s obituary gives the particulars of his life and death and ends with the cryptic line “He had been discovered by the Wisher.” This mysterious figure—the Wisher—looms over the action of the entire narrative, in which a man going by the name of Jon Smyth seeks to reconcile his burgeoning love for a beautiful woman named Lilyanne with his own dealings with the Wisher, who “lives in the realm of fairness and justice, of an eternal divine order.” The author expertly balances the storylines of Smyth and Adam Micah (the true identity of Aristotle Zurr-McIntyre), both of whom seem connected to a strange group of mutants called vanishers who have the ability to regenerate damaged organs and disappear when they’re killed. The dialogue is peppy (“ ‘So, read me a poem,’ she proposed. ‘The young is night.’ ‘Ah.’ I laughed. ‘There we go with that cryptic phrase of yours. It’s all backward—’ ‘Life is backward,’ she interjected”), and rapid-fire scenes effectively maintain the mystery surrounding both the Wisher and the vanishers, mysteries Mikheyev skillfully leaves open-ended right to the story’s conclusion. Even die-hard SF readers won’t see some of the turns coming.

A twisty, satisfyingly unpredictable SF action tale.