A review by beautiful_articulate
The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America's Wildlands by Jon Billman

adventurous emotional mysterious sad medium-paced

4.0

I loved Billman’s writing style. It really felt like I was tagging along in the search for Jacob Gray, and I feel like he did a great job portraying the people he met along the way. The Cold Vanish is an excellent narrative about not only the people that go missing in the American wilderness, but also the people looking for them. The entire portion on the search for Jacob was by far my favorite part of the book, as Billman talks about all the angles that were covered during the search: criminal, paranormal, natural, etc. 

The thing that prevents this book from being a 5-star read was how disorganized some of the other missing persons stories were and how they were sprinkled in with the story of Jacob Gray. For some I definitely see a connection and found it interesting to see them linked with Jacob Gray’s disappearance, but for others it felt like they were included purely because they caught the author’s attention. Of course, I don’t actually have a problem with that, I just thought they might have had a better place in the book than sprinkled in-between the Jacob Gray narrative. 

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