The Vanishing Point
By Val McDermid 
(Atlantic Monthly Press)

Reality television may be the ultimate con game, as British author Val McDermid shows in her highly entertaining 26th novel, “The Vanishing Point.”

After all, don’t you wonder just how much of all that bad behavior is an act and how much is truth. Is it reality or clever acting?

With the consummate scam as its foundation, “The Vanishing Point” also is about motherhood and the lengths that one will go to save a child as the action bounds from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to London and Romania without losing a beat.

As a ghost writer to the stars, Stephanie Harker knows well the difference between a celebrity’s public and private persona. As “the insignificant one in the shadows,” ghost writers are, she says, “the cosmetic surgeons of image.” Stephanie also is a bit of a con artist herself, with a lucrative career as “an invisible” author whose work is credited to other people.

But Stephanie wasn’t prepared for Scarlett Higgins, an uneducated reality star fond of spouting racial comments. But those public antics are all an act, a con game that Scarlett revels in. When Scarlett becomes pregnant by Joshua Patel, an Asian DJ and minor British celebrity, she wants Stephanie to write her memoir.

The work between the two women blossoms into a real friendship with Stephanie impressed daily with how Scarlett reinvented herself after a rough upbringing by a “toxic family.”

The women are so close that Scarlett, who is dying of cancer, names Stephanie the sole guardian of her son, Jimmy. And so no family member will want to care for Jimmy, she leaves all her money to charity.

But while Stephanie and 5-year-old Jimmy are going through airport security at O’Hare, the child is kidnapped by a man posing as a TSA agent.

“The Vanishing Point” moves at a brisk pace as Stephanie uses every trick in her writing arsenal to become a detective searching for the missing child. The consummate single woman is now a frantic mother desperate for her child. Told in flashbacks, Stephanie offers her own tell-all about Scarlett and Jimmy to the perceptive FBI agent trying to find out how a child could disappear in the airport. McDermid keeps the plot riddled with believable twists and turns while delving into deep character studies and examining the world’s fixation with celebrities.

McDermid’s hallmark is creating new universes for each of her novels, including her series about profiler Tony Hill and detective Carol Jordan. Once again, McDermid has delivered an original, fresh novel with “The Vanishing Point.” (MCT)