With Vanished, her thirty-first best-selling novel, Danielle Steel brings to life the story of a man and woman faced with an almost unthinkable tragedy – the mysterious abduction of their young son. 

          In the late 1930s, in the shadow of the Lindbergh kidnapping, and as war looms in Europe, Marielle Patterson shares her life with her husband, Malcolm, and their little boy, Teddy, in an elegant brownstone on New York’s Upper East Side. But their lives are filled with secrets. Haunted by a past she has kept hidden even from her husband, Marielle secretly lights a candle each year for a child who died in a tragic accident when he was scarcely more than a baby. Consumed with guilt, Marielle is nevertheless a devoted wife and mother. Malcolm, stern and successful, is a man everyone admires. 

          On the eve of little Teddy’s disappearance, Marielle runs into her first love, American expatriate Charles Delauney. The ache of memory is instantly revived, their brief moments together bittersweet and explosive. And when Teddy is kidnapped, Charles is first blamed, then arrested. Suspicions and accusations mingle with terror and heartbreak as the Pattersons, the New York police, and the FBI turn the city and eventually the country, upside down, looking for Teddy. The inevitable parallels with the Lindberghs are drawn, and the fear that Teddy has been killed can’t be ignored. Every threat, every failure, every terror, is remembered, examined, explored. Even Marielle is scrutinized by the FBI, and special agent John Taylor. 

          The questions are inevitable: Who kidnapped Teddy Patterson? Did Charles Delauney? Someone else? Did Marielle conspire with them? Is the child dead or alive? Does Malcolm, the boy’s father, have secrets of his own? John Taylor becomes obsessed with mother and child, and finding the elusive answers. A terrifying court drama seeks to put Charles Delauney behind bars as a series of revelations begins to unravel the truth about Marielle, Charles, and Malcolm.