As far as anyone knows, Adam Micah’s father Kevin killed himself. So when Adam loses his mother and their neighbor in a car accident, he’s now alone in the world. That’s what he thinks, at least, until he receives a note from his allegedly long-dead father. Kevin is still alive—and the thing that kept him alive is in Adam, too. They are both “vanishers”: a rare breed of human who, upon death, disappears and is reborn elsewhere in the world. Kevin has been navigating this cycle of vanishing and rebirth when Adam finds himself flung into it, too. Soon, he’s being chased around the world by people who want the scientific secrets inside him. Eventually renaming himself and keeping tabs on his unraveling memories via obituaries and a journal, Adam—now Aristotle—attempts to get to the bottom of his strange condition. His journey will lead him to unscrupulous scientists and hitmen, the love of his life in the person of Lilyanne, and a mysterious entity known only as the Wisher.
Like Adam/Ari, Moses Yuriyvich Mikheyev’s VANISHING BODIES reinvents itself. Every time he reawakens somewhere new, the story takes a new turn. From high school drama to sci-fi intrigue to romance to thriller, the story changes and evolves like its protagonist. The reader is occasionally left adrift between Ari’s new lives, leaving them to pull together the threads alongside him. At other times, well-developed plots drop away, discarded and obsolete. In any other book, this would be considered bad writing. But in VANISHING BODIES, it’s an apt metaphor for the life of a vanisher. The reader is right next to Adam/Ari, pouring all their feelings into his new family life in Croatia, or his hunt for the doctor who can help him, or his romance with Lilyanne… only for it to be completely over a few pages later. The finale crashes in, completely at odds with everything that came before, ending in a bittersweet epilogue. Author Mikheyev has masterfully placed the reader in his protagonists shoes, whipping them from life to life, cutting ties without warning and leaving loose ends unaddressed.
This is the greatest strength of VANISHING BODIES. At times, Mikheyev seems a little too eager to explain what it all means, telling a lesson that’s already been masterfully shown just a few pages before. But this is a small complaint compared to the engrossing ride of the overall story and it’s a meaningful metaphor for all the people one person becomes throughout life: how everyone grows, reinvents, and regenerates, even without special DNA.
In VANISHING BODIES, Moses Yuriyvich Mikheyev presents a narrative as malleable as its protagonist: changing genres from chapter to chapter, but always clinging to its core heartfelt message.
~Kara Dennison for IndieReader