Vanished by Irene Hannon

This is the first book I've read by Irene Hannon and I can promise that it won't be the last. It had me riveted with the suspense in it. I didn't want to put it down, but it made me so nervous I didn't want to keep reading!

A car accident in the middle of the night leaves Moira confused. She's sure she hit someone but the evidence has all but disappeared. Her instinct as a reporter is telling her to dig deeper, but digging deeper may cause her her life. 

This is the kind of book that I like. One that grabs your attention and holds it to the end with an exciting storyline that is completely clean. Kudos to the author for this clean read.

About the book & author:
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In her newest romantic-suspense novel, critically-acclaimed author Irene Hannon asks herself what would happen if the victim of a deadly car crash on a secluded country road simply disappeared? Vanished is the gripping first novel in Hannon’s Private Justice series. It opens with a shadowy figure caught in the beam of reporter Moira Harrison’s headlights – followed by a solid thump before she loses control and crashes into a tree. But when Moira regains consciousness, the victim is nowhere to be seen.

The police say the disappearance never happened, but Moira can’t forget the look of sheer terror she saw on the person’s face in the instant it was caught in the glare of her headlights. Now her only hope of discovering the truth is a former police detective turned private eye—and her own investigate skills.

As often happens for Hannon, the genesis of this story came out of the blue, triggered by a simple incident.

“I was driving home from church one rainy night and my headlights fell on a bicyclist on the edge of the narrow road. I swerved to avoid him, thinking what a risk he was taking. Then the wheels in my brain started turning and I began what-iffing. What if a woman was driving alone on a country road and suddenly caught a desperate figure in her headlights? What if she swerved, but hit the figure? What if a stranger appeared out of the darkness to offer assistance before she lost consciousness? What if she woke up and both the stranger and the victim had disappeared? My five-second encounter on that rainy night was the impetus not only for this book, but for my whole Private Justice series, which focuses on situations that have fallen through the cracks of official law enforcement or been dismissed by the police.”

Hannon, a former communications executive for a Fortune 500 company, left the corporate world in 2003 to focus on her growing fiction brand. While continuing to write contemporary romance, she also delved into suspense. From the beginning, her romantic suspense books have garnered rave reviews. Booklist named Deadly Pursuit (Revell, 2011) one of the top ten inspirational fiction titles for 2011. The final book in her Guardians of Justice series, Lethal Legacy (Revell, 2011) received a starred review from Library Journal, which praised the book for its “compelling characters and edge-of-your-seat action.”

Irene Hannon is the author of more than 40 novels, including the bestselling Heroes of Quantico and Guardians of Justice series. Her books have been honored with two coveted RITA awards from Romance Writers of America, a Carol Award, a HOLT Medallion, a National Readers’ Choice Award, a Daphne du Maurier Award, a Retailers Choice Award and two Reviewers' Choice Awards from RT Book Reviews magazine. She lives in Missouri.

This book provided for review by The Baker Publishing Group