What We’re Reading: Vanishing Daughters by Cynthia Pelayo

A Novel from Girls Write Now Teaching Artist Cynthia Pelayo

Cynthia Pelayo is a longtime member of the Girls Write Now community, having taught a workshop for us called True Crime Poetry: Activating Awareness back in 2022. Now, she has come out with a novel of psychological suspense, following a haunted woman stalked by a serial killer confronting the horrors of fairy tales and the nightmares of real life.

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.