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Vanishing Daughters

A Thriller

Cynthia Pelayo author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Amazon Publishing

Publishing:11th Mar '25

£8.99

This title is due to be published on 11th March, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Vanishing Daughters cover

A haunted woman stalked by a serial killer confronts the horrors of fairy tales and the nightmares of real life in a breathtaking novel of psychological suspense by a Bram Stoker Award–winning author.

It started the night journalist Briar Thorne’s mother died in their rambling old mansion on Chicago’s South Side.

The nightmares of a woman in white pleading to come home, music switched on in locked rooms, and the panicked fear of being swallowed by the dark…Bri has almost convinced herself that these stirrings of dread are simply manifestations of grief and not the beyond-world of ghostly impossibilities her mother believed in. And more tangible terrors still lurk outside the decaying Victorian greystone.

A serial killer has claimed the lives of fifty-one women in the Chicago area. When Bri starts researching the murders, she meets a stranger who tells her there’s more to her sleepless nights than bad dreams—they hold the key to putting ghosts to rest and stopping a killer. But the killer has caught on and is closing in, and if Bri doesn’t answer the call of the dead soon, she’ll be walking among them.

Vanishing Daughters is a creepy, moody, devious heartbreaker of a novel! Great characters and a compelling plot filled with twists you won’t see coming. Darkly elegant!” —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of NecroTek and editor of Weird Tales Magazine

Vanishing Daughters plunges us into the nightmare that is grief, from which it feels impossible to wake. Pelayo constructs an elegant yet haunting house of memories, dreamlike vignettes quilted, and interweaves violence, true crime, injustice with dark fairy tales through part poetry, part prose. In this multilayered exploration of sleeping women awakened, Vanishing Daughters illuminates how our lives are inseparable from folklore, from our ancestors, even if unfair.” —Ai Jiang, Bram Stoker and Nebula Award–winning author of Linghun

“A marvelous fusion of fairy tale and haunted Chicago history, loss and the will to live on, age-old injustices and a drive to give peace to the past. Mysterious and spooky, Vanishing Daughters is as heartrending as it is spine tingling, a girls-gone-missing tale in which Cynthia Pelayo navigates grief to find purpose in our many deaths, one for every soul we’ve ever loved and lost.” —Nick Medina, author of Indian Burial Ground

“A lyrical, ghostly homage to the city of Chicago. One of Pelayo’s finest.” —Erika T. Wurth, author of White Horse

“A cerebral thicket, growing tight around and keeping you. No matter how much we think we know, Pelayo shows there’s always another stone to overturn in her Chicago tales. Vanishing Daughters bares the heart in its rawest condition, revealing how our human nature can erode the lines between past and present, between grief and obsession, and between dark fairy tale and ghost story.” —Hailey Piper, Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Queen of Teeth and All the Hearts You Eat

ISBN: 9781662513930

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

336 pages