Last Seen Wearing ... (1952) is a detective novel by Hillary Waugh frequently referred to as the police procedural par excellence.

Set in a fictional college town in Massachusetts, the book is about a female freshman who goes missing and the painstaking investigation carried out by the police with the aim of finding out what has happened to her.

"The police examine her past for any motive that might make her wish to disappear, or any reason why someone might want to kill her.

As they sift all the evidence again and again, the identity of her killer slowly begins to emerge, like a photograph taking on recognizable features in the developing fluid" (Ian Ousby).

that the novel is based on the true case of the December 1, 1946, vanishing of a Bennington College student, 18-year-old Stamford, Connecticut, resident Paula Jean Welden,[citation needed] while hiking the Long Trail in the Green Mountains near Bennington, Vermont.