Rotorua author Zoë Rankin's debut novel hit shelves this week.
It took less than a chapter to convince a publisher they had found New Zealand’s next thriller writer.
Rotorua author Zoë Rankin sold her debut novel – a psychological thriller called The Vanishing Place – to Moa Press on the strength of just 4000 words.
“They bought a book that didn’t exist,” Rankin said.
Two years later, she had expanded that sample into a 95,000 word novel, which hit shelves this week.
Rankin grew up in a “tiny” Scottish village of about 500 people where she could stand on the mountains and see for miles across treeless, “bare” landscapes.
Moving to NZ, she discovered the opposite.
“No one can find you,” she said. “You can disappear into the bush.”
You could even hide from police, she said, a reality she realised after following the Tom Phillips case.
Rankin said the idea that in a modern world where “everyone knows everything about everyone”, you can still vanish, grew into The Vanishing Place.
The novel opens with a bloodied young girl staggering out of the bush and collapsing in a small-town store. A policeman recognises her face. She looks exactly like a girl who vanished 20 years ago.
Rankin said early readers found themselves constantly wrong-footed by the twists.
“They’re 90% through and they’ve got 800 questions.”
It all comes together in the last 10%, she said.
She set her novel in a fictional town called Koraha, meaning “wilderness” in te reo Māori.
It was modelled on Haast, after she spent time on the West Coast.
Every other place, river, mountain and road in the book carried its true NZ name.
Rankin has lived in Rotorua for nine years, and wrote much of the book while raising her two young children, drafting scenes in stolen moments at home or at Ciabatta Cafe and Bakery.
She described her cafe sessions as “intense writing”, so immersive that when she went up to order, she sometimes had to remind herself where she was.
“I cried writing it,” Rankin said of one scene.
Rankin said she loved the idea of placing a child’s voice at the centre of the novel.
Her teaching background fed into that choice. She taught in Rotorua and Marotiri, a rural community outside Taupō. At 17, Rankin volunteered as a teacher in Uganda, an experience she said shaped her personality and self-belief.
“Going to Uganda had literally been all I’d ever dreamed about since I was 8 years old,” Rankin said.
When she fell ill and a doctor sent her back to Scotland early, it felt like failure.
Rankin had been travelling her whole life to prove to herself she was not a failure.
“I think it could be why I now live in NZ, the furthest possible point from my home,” she said.
The main character of The Vanishing Place, Effie, reflected that part of Rankin, carrying the same weighted childhood events.
Rankin said Effie isn’t based on her, but they share similarities including a love of the outdoors and a mountaineering background.
Rankin said her father was the oldest member of his Scottish mountain rescue team until his recent retirement. His knowledge made for realistic retellings of mountain rescues in the novel.
She also drew on her own hikes and nights in backcountry huts to capture the rawness of the NZ wilderness.
The Vanishing Place had already leapt beyond NZ, with Penguin Random House set to publish it in the United States and United Kingdom imprint Viper releasing it later this year.
Rankin said it was “really lovely” to share NZ’s landscapes with readers abroad.
“I really wanted to make you feel like when you’re reading it, you’re in the trees.”
She credits the support of her husband and Rotorua’s close-knit writing community with making the book possible.
Rankin is already halfway through her second thriller.
Annabel Reid is a multimedia journalist for the Bay of Plenty Times and Rotorua Daily Post, based in Rotorua. Originally from Hawke’s Bay, she has a Bachelor of Communications from the University of Canterbury.