Margaret always knew that her family was a little strange. Not that she was exactly normal herself After all, she did do her sixth-grade science report on a pack of killer Chihuahuas. Even stranger was the fact that Margaret's mother never seemed to talk about anything anymore -- not since the mysterious drowning death of Margaret's father three years earlier.

Then Margaret's mother takes her and her little sister, Sophie, to an old abandoned mansion and places a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign in the front yard. But who could have lived there? And why was her mother keeping it all such a secret?

Convinced that her father's death, her mother's silence, and the mansion are somehow related, Margaret returns to the spooky old house alone, determined to make sense of three clues: a swimming medal, a key, and a strange, handwritten comic book about a boy who turned into a rat. With the help of Boyd, the lonely, comic-book-obsessed boy next door, she discovers that truth can be stranger than fiction -- depending upon who's telling the story.

An offbeat mystery about coincidence, fate, and the many different ways to tell the same story, "How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found" is the unforgettable tale of a twelveyear-old girl who discovers just how terribly beautiful and wonderfully bizarre the world and the people around her can be.