Title: The Vanishing Stair
Author(s) Name(s): Maureen Johnson
Published in: January, 2019
Why You Might Like This Book: Read this book if you enjoy
- cold cases,
- crime fiction,
- young adult thriller,
- detective stories, and
- slowburn novels.
Who Should Avoid This Book: Avoid this book if you are triggered by or dislike
- loss of a friend,
- grief,
- physical assault,
- unhealthy parent-child relationships, or
- slow-burn mysteries.
The Vanishing Stair is the second book in the highly popular Truly Devious series written by Maureen Johnson. With this series, Maureen Johnson sets high standards for modern-day YA thriller novels in English. Please start with the first book of the series to get the best experience if you have still not read that. Part 1 ended with what many call a cliffhanger ending, but the novel itself was quite intriguing, making many readers get to part 2 almost immediately.
To begin with, I’m going to be honest. I never thought I’d say this about a Maureen Johnson novel, but the first five chapters are a strong reminder that this book is intended for young adults if not for kids, and it might truly test your patience if you are an adult. Also, with several long pages of the thoughts that run inside Stevie Bell’s mind, the beginning of the book is quite slow. I won’t be surprised if a reader would easily lose interest and put this book aside. Definitely not what I expected, but knowing fully well that Johnson can write impressive stories, I continued after skipping a few pages here and there.
The beginning is mostly just a recap of what happened in the past, the old Ellingham case that still remains unsolved, what happened last year at the Ellingham academy, how badly Stevie misses her friends and this school now that she is away, and how she gets back to the school to reconnect with her friends, her crush, and the school itself. In The Vanishing Stair, Stevie Bell reunites with her friends at Ellingham, he boyfriend and she break the awkwardness and their romance grows further, but she is still as anxious as she was earlier, still having to take medicines for anxiety when she needs. With the dark reality of one classmate who had died and one other classmate who went missing still looming in the air, she is still thinking about crime, like a determined detective would. Who is responsible for the Ellingham murders and who killed her classmate?
Most of the middle part of this book feels more like drama, with little to no thrilling twists for a long time. But because of the author’s writing style, some thriller lovers might still enjoy it. In this story, as you can predict, the friendships they all share at Ellingham and the romance between Stevie and David grow deeper. I have been convinced that female authors know romance way better than most male authors do. And male characters written by female authors are often just perfect! Once again, as if to prove my point, for their Halloween party, in which Stevie has little interest but would still participate, David comes dressed up as Sherlock Holmes! I laughed. David, as annoying as he can be, knows how to impress his girl. We remember how Stevie began liking him in part 1. As David teases Stevie, if they are Porlock or Sheriot, lovers of crime fiction would find themselves amused. If Truly Devious were a Netflix series, I’d definitely watch!
We are also introduced to a few new characters. Stevie gets an opportunity to work with Dr. Fenton, a woman who works mainly on the Ellingham murder cases and happens to be a popular author who had penned a book on the same subject. Dr. Fenton gives Stevie an assignment, an opportunity to officially work on the case, to look for something specific at the Ellingham Academy, and there is nothing more that Stevie would want, so she accepts the opportunity, even after promising Larry that she will not snoop around anymore. Hunter is Dr. Fenton’s nephew, and the two live together. Stevie gets the feeling that they both are not giving her the full picture and there is something they are hiding from her, even though her new supervisor seems professional and her nephew seems friendly. There is also Mudge, Stevie’s new lab partner for anatomy. Mudge is a tall, big guy who seems to be quite good at dissection and anatomy and is also primarily interested in working at the Disney World.
As we had in Part 1, Part 2 also moves back and forth between the past and the present. The past gives us more information about Dottie Epstein, Albert Ellingham and his close contacts after Ellingham’s wife and child were kidnapped. In the present, as Stevie works with and around her old friends and the staff and other characters to try to make progress with the case, she accidentally discovers something, as she solves riddles. In part 1, Hayes was murdered and Ellie went missing and until now, nobody is able to locate Ellie or learn anything about her whereabouts, until Stevie finds out what happened to Ellie. This leaves everyone shocked, as one can guess, and she still hasn’t solved the original case. She digs further and further, and like you probably did with the first book, you might experience a rush of curiousity towards the end of the book, only to learn that exactly like we had in part 1, this book also ends with a cliffhanger ending. Stevie seems to have solved the past Ellingham cases; she seems to have found out who was responsible for the kidnapping of Iris and Alice Ellingham. But becaus ethis comes too slowly, after a long wait, it does not excite you as much as you would have expected. But the present-day case is still pending – who killed Hayes? What happend to a few others? Are the past and the rpesent somehow connected?
This is certainly not a fast-paced thriller, it is a slow-burn, and the book could have been shorter. The mystery build-up is also not that good. You might get the feeling as though the book was filled with interpersonal drama only because the author needed to get a 300-400 page novel out. A few things that can keep a reader going would be the author’s writing style and the reader’s curiousity to find out what really did happen!
