The Boxcar Children

#106 The Vanishing Passenger by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 2006.

The Alden children have been working on a project at their public library to invite the author of one of their favorite book series to visit as a guest speaker.  However, when they go to meet his train, the author isn’t there.  He’s completely disappeared!

The Aldens know that he got on the train because they spoke to him on the phone earlier.  When they interview some of the passengers, they discover that the train trip was somewhat chaotic.  The train passed through a harsh storm.  A small dog disappeared, and his heart-broken family is searching for him as well.  The evidence seems to point to the author jumping off the train, but why would he do that?  Where is he now, and why hasn’t he tried to get in touch with them?

Carefully, the Aldens have to work backward through the train journey, piecing together the author’s movements to put together the whole story.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I really appreciated the premise of this story. A mysterious disappearance makes a more unusual kind of mystery than the more typical crimes that appear in mystery stories, like theft. This is a story of a trip in which quite a lot of things went wrong.  The kids do manage to track down their missing author with some surprising help from the author’s rival, who is also apparently his friend, showing the children that not all competition has to be unfriendly.