Vanishing Daughters

A Thriller

By: Cynthia Pelayo

Narrated by: Joe Knezevich, Emily Lawrence

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.

©2025 by Cynthia Pelayo. (P)2025 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Critic reviews

“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