The Disappearing

Jennifer Torres's The Disappearing is a creepy mystery for 11 year olds about a seaside town where children start to vanish, one after another.

What happens

Tim loves life in Briny Deep. He skateboards down to the beach with his four best friends, Max, Luke, Emily and Nina, and everyone at school calls them "The Family". The only blots are a nightmare he has every single night, running from a man towards a yellow house, and the fact that he likes Nina a lot more than he's ever admitted.

Then the police bang on the door in the middle of the night. A girl called Eva has gone missing. Tim remembers a stranger with cropped white-blond hair, staring at Luke's house. Next, a boy disappears during a game of hide and seek. Then Emily's little sister. Then Luke.

The whole town goes into lockdown. Worse, the police don't believe there ever was a stranger. So Tim decides that if the grown-ups can't find his friends, he will.

It reads fast and keeps leaving you on a cliffhanger. Every so often the story cuts away to the kidnappers themselves (a crew who go by nicknames like Canary and Lone Star). You know more than Tim does, which somehow makes it tenser, not less.

There's a bit of first-crush stuff too, with Tim and Nina each sure the other isn't interested. It's very sweet and gives your reader something to smile about between the scares.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This one is built around children being taken, and we're told how some of them were lured away (one little girl is tricked with a story about a lost puppy). Luke's mum and older brother died before the story begins. The kidnappings are told rather than shown and nothing is gory in the chapters that set it all up, but a child who worries about strangers could find it unsettling.

For a reader who loves a spooky page-turner, with kids who refuse to leave it to the grown-ups, it's a gripping one.

What to read next

If a vanishing is exactly their sort of puzzle, try The London Eye Mystery, where Ted's cousin disappears from a sealed pod on a giant observation wheel.