The Railway Children

In the summer of 1978, four children disappeared from a small New Zealand railway town.

They were never found.

Nearly fifty years later, demolition work on an old railway bridge reveals something hidden inside a sealed cavity, possessions belonging to the missing children.

For Sarah McKenzie, a recently widowed former television journalist, the discovery is more than an old mystery resurfacing. Her late mother was one of the last adults known to have seen the children alive.

Sarah begins asking questions the town stopped asking decades ago.

Old cassette recordings. Faded photographs. Diaries. Half-remembered conversations. Each piece draws her deeper into the final weeks of that long-ago summer, when fourteen-year-old Jack Sullivan, his younger sister Lucy, Erin Walker and Tama Te Rangi seemed to vanish without leaving a trace.

But small towns remember things selectively.

And some secrets survive because people learn when not to speak.

As Sarah closes in on what really happened in 1978, she discovers that the story she grew up believing may never have been the truth at all.

The Railway Children is an atmospheric New Zealand mystery about childhood friendship, buried history and the secrets families carry for generations.

Book One of The Vanished Summer.