Marion Barter disappeared in 1997 and police thought the divorced mother had just up and abandoned her family. The why on this is not entirely clear. To me, this would be like my mother disappearing and the police deciding she just jetted off to start a new life and never contacting anyone again. Yeah, because exactly NOTHING in my mother’s life would ever make anyone believe she would actually do that.

Here, Marion was an award winning schoolteacher. She had been divorced, but she had two children she was fairly close to. There had been so-called sightings of her but these could be easily faked. It just sounds to me like the police couldn’t find her or find evidence of a crime, so they immediately defaulted to “she’s run away” versus “she’s missing and we don’t know why.”

But I don’t know this for sure. Because I quit the book about 20% in.

I honestly felt about guilty to Marion for giving up on it. It’s clear from the parts I did read that a few years ago there was a popular Australian podcast that picked up the cold case and they either know or think they know what happened to her now, thanks only to the continuing efforts of her daughter (daughters are the best. Sons? Useless. Mostly. They can probably reach high things and they save all their allowance money so, when they are kids, moms and daughters can conspire together to steal their cash from them to get Pizza Hut, not that that EVER happened in the Brewster household, sorry, TJ, I swear we planned to pay you back.)

So, anyway, the book seemed to be mostly about how to start a podcast from nothing (which, actually, was quite easy for this bunch considering they were all in the TV news business. Would be much harder from me, especially since I don’t think my brother has anything handy for me to steal this time) and a lot of repetition. Plus there were a lot of quick jumps back and forth over time, sometimes spanning decades. And it was just….I’m SO SORRY, Marion, a bit dull. I think the book may have been a lot about the podcast, which I gather was very popular.

If you know the podcast and/or the crime you may enjoy this. Otherwise I can’t recommend.

I started following “The Lady Vanishes” podcast when the first episode came out in 2019. It was an investigative journalism podcast made to help a woman find her mother, Marion Barter, who went missing in 1997. What they thought would be 8-10 episodes turned out to be a wild ride of discovery that took 5 years (and over 50 episodes) with many twists and turns.

This book laid out all the information from the podcast that became pertinent to what most likely happened to Marion. Podcast listeners will love having everything organized on the page because listening to the details of the real time discoveries could be hard to piece together at times. Also, if you’re interested in the case but don’t want to listen to 50 episodes worth of content, you’ll appreciate this book.

This book also contains some behind-the-scenes information that I really enjoyed about the podcast, like more about how episodes were made and who was involved.

This story is a crazy one and I so feel for everything Marion’s daughter has been through to find her. It’s an incredible story I want everyone to know about. 10/10 recommend.