Freelance journalists Tom and Janis Dryden, who specialise in the offbeat and bizarre, are tipped off by an RAF serviceman about an incident in the Welsh hills that the authorities are striving to cover up. An airliner crashed there but no bodies were ever recovered. Is it possible that the 176 passengers and crew were in some way removed from the airliner before it crashed? And if so, what has become of them? These are the questions facing Tom and Janis but soon they find there's far more to this mystery than even the absence of 176 bodies.

Their investigation leads them to the sinister scientist Jake Lebraum, who is experimenting with aspects of the paranormal that go well beyond the ethical. And soon the two journalists, with their 10-year-old son Kallum whom doctors mistakenly say is retarded, are embroiled in a conspiracy that involves murder, time travel and teleportation.

This is the latest paranormal and sci-fi thriller by Carl Hughes, an award-winning writer and himself a journalist who has in the course of his career pursued many offbeat stories. Though none, perhaps, as bizarre as 'The Vanished'.