KAREN’S KILLER BOOK BENCH: Welcome to Karen’s Killer Book Bench, where readers can discover talented new authors and take a peek inside their wonderful books. This is not an age-filtered site, so all book peeks are PG-13 or better. Come back and visit often. Happy reading!

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VANISHING DAUGHTERS
A Thriller
BY CYNTHIA PELAYO

BLURB

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

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VANISHING DAUGHTERS
A Thriller
BY CYNTHIA PELAYO

Interview

Can you tell us a little bit about  your 10^th book VANISHING DAUGHTERS? 

Vanishing Daughters follows Briar Rose Thorne after the death of her mother. She’s inherited their ancestral home, a crumbling mansion on Chicago’s South Side. Briar is suffering from the emotional and physiological effects of grief. She cannot eat. Her sleep is restless, and she soon starts to have nightmares with a woman in white begging Bri to take her home. Additionally, Bri’s a freelance journalist and needs to get to work in order to maintain the house. As she starts researching, she stumbles upon a series of articles about the unsolved murders of 51 women throughout the city. Through Bri’s research, she gets too close to the serial killer and draws his attention. In order to solve the mystery of who the woman in white is, Bri is forced to confront the killer.

Did anything in particular inspire your latest?

I started thinking about the different variations of Sleeping Beauty. There are numerous. We often associate Sleeping Beauty as a beautiful young woman cursed to sleep until a prince breaks the spell with a kiss. That is not true in all of the variations. In Charles Perrault’s version, “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” the princess awakens after the 100 years in which she had been cursed to sleep: “At the same moment, the hour of disenchantment having come, the princess awoke.” Then, I just started thinking about the folklore of the vanishing hitchhiker, how that’s often a woman. Additionally, I started thinking about the large number of unsolved murders in the Chicagoland area. Finally, I started thinking about sleep, dreams, this twilight state of in between wake and dream, and of grief and how grieving feels very unreal. When one grieves intensely, at least when I did, I felt like my entire reality had shifted. All of that went into the making of Vanishing Daughters.

Anything else to come from you this year?

I’m working on a lot of short stories, essays, a new novel, which is a historic horror novel, and my backlist Children of Chicago, The Shoemaker’s Magician and Lotería will be re-released and available in all bookstores by Fall 2025.

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About Author Cynthia Pelayo…

Links to Cynthia’s websites, blogs, books, #ad etc.:

Amazon Kindle: https://amzn.to/3QWmGAY

Amazon Paperback: https://amzn.to/41KyvR7

Website: www.cinapelayo.com

Happy Reading!

Thanks, Cynthia, for sharing your book with us!

Don’t miss the chance to read this book!