Book Review 2022 #1 - Maureen Johnson's The Vanishing Stair
The Vanishing Stair by Maureen Johnson
Published by: Katherine Tegen Books
Publication Date: January 22nd, 2019
Format: Paperback, 400 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy
Stevie feels like the world has turned upside down. If there was one person in the world whom she thought she would never be grateful for it's Edward King. The conservative politician with White House dreams whom her parents worship and work for has been a divisive subject for years. And yet here he is in her living room giving her what she most desires in the world, a return ticket to Ellingham Academy. After the tragic death of Hayes Major and the disappearance of Ellie Walker, Stevie's parents pulled her out of Ellingham faster than she thought possible. They never thought she belonged there, hell she was never sure she belonged there, but it's where she needs to be. She needs to solve the Truly Devious case, and if that means making a deal with the devil then so be it. Even if it means spying on David. To be fair, David is the one who dropped the bombshell that he's Edward King's son on her only when his hand was forced. But that can be unpacked another day, what needs to be unpacked now is the tin she found in Ellie's room with new evidence relating to the Truly Devious case. Who exactly are Frankie and Edward and how do they tie into the mystery? Well if anyone alive knows that it's Dr. Irene Fenton. Dr. Fenton wrote THE BOOK on the crime; Truly Devious: The Ellingham Murders. Charles Scott, the head of Ellingham Academy and Stevie's advisor, has arranged for her to be Dr. Fenton's research assistant. Stevie has access to the attics at Ellingham Academy and has been cataloging the items within and therefore can verify china patterns used and other seemingly useless details for an updated edition of Dr. Fenton's book. Because if there's one thing she's quickly learned about Dr. Fenton it's that she is even more obsessed with the Truly Devious case than Stevie herself. Dr. Fenton's house looks like a cliched conspiracy theorist's hideout. But somewhere among all those secreted papers maybe Dr. Fenton has found a new clue, one thing Stevie does learn from her is that there's a secret tunnel in her school lodging. On Halloween Stevie and David and Nate look for the tunnel in Minerva House and find more than they bargained for, Ellie's body. Stevie feels in over her head. Everyone seems to have a secret and none moreso than Ellingham Academy itself. One thing is clear, with all these bodies piling up she might solve the case but she might also end up dead.
This is THE BOOK that made me fall in love with this series. Perhaps I related too strongly to a quirky writer with a few too many cats... and I also have a borderline obsession with moose. But really it was Frankie and Edward that captured my imagination. What I loved is that this book took the ingeniously repurposed Dorothy Parker poem that was viewed as the ominous warning of the crime to come and in fact gave the case it's moniker and turned it on it's head. Which in turn made me think of something else tangentially related and kind of blew my mind as to why I never thought of it before. It's also extra ironic that it has to deal with Jack the Ripper, a case that Stevie views as a little too sensationalized and therefore not for her. So in her book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed Patricia Cornwell makes a big deal of the fact that the "From Hell" letter which is believed to written by Jack the Ripper was written on the same kind of paper the artist Walter Sickert used, meaning that he must be Jack the Ripper. She has spent millions buying up his artwork and trying to find DNA evidence to prove her point but here Stevie got me wondering, what if Cornwell is right about the letter but wrong about Sickert? Yes, it's commonly believed that the "From Hell" letter is genuine, but what if it's not? What if it was written by a deluded artist and actually had nothing to do with the crime? In other words, the person who writes the letter might not be the killer. This revelation that Stevie stumbles upon with regard to the "Truly Devious" letter and Frankie and Edward just ignited my brain. Coincidences can happen, especially when someone wants to be thought of as evil. If you're two teenagers wanting to be Bonnie and Clyde or an artist wanting to be the most notorious serial killer of all time, wouldn't you do something to try to get that notoriety? In Frankie and Edward's case they didn't know things would play out as they did, but they sure got what they wanted. And this gave me what I wanted. A case I thought was pretty straightforward, a case I figured I had solved, but then Maureen Johnson throws this little wrench in and makes me think, I mean really think. That's why this series is so good, nothing is as it appears and death is a very real possibility. The question is is moose also a possibility?
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