I’ve been reading legal thrillers by Methos for a couple years. That’s what he writes! Up to now. Now he’s got a new game and it’s a procedural thriller. Vanished is the first in a trilogy featuring the detective partners Kyle Dixon and his new partner, newly relocated from LA, Ethan Bodin . They work out of Cheyenne, Wyoming, they’re both white and about the same age but where Bodin’s wife is not in the picture and he has an adolescent daughter, Dixon’s wife is having issues of her own. They have a baby son.  

Vanished
by Victor Methos
2021
Read by Patrick Zeller 6h 46m
Rating – B+ / crime 

Bodin comes off as a “good guy” fresh, very smart and apparently gung-ho from LA.  Dixon is cynical and somewhat hardened Cheyenne-savvy cop. His last partner was killed not too long prior.  Still – although there are plenty of differences I had a hard time remembering which name was new in town.  If I got that far I remembered the rest. 

One day they get an anonymous tip and go checking a remote setting in the mountains.  There they find the corpse of a woman who was left hanging from a tree like she’d been crucified. Her breasts and insides were cut out/off.  They look into it but later the chief calls them in.  He wants the case buried because of an upcoming election.  The thing is that the perpetrator might be a serial killer.   

There are other threads going on and a few of them build quite a lot of tension.  There was too much time spent on developing the non-cop relationships but that kind of cleared up by the end. In fact, the whole book got better after 2/3rds.