If you want to dabble in new genres this year, then we’ve got the book for you! Introducing Vanishing Daughters, Cynthia Pelayo’s new gothic thriller and psychological suspense novel.
Vanishing Daughters by Cynthia Pelayo blends dark fairytales and urban legends with true crime. It retells the classic “Sleeping Beauty” in a suspenseful new story that made us keep looking over our shoulder.
We thoroughly enjoyed reading Vanishing Daughters, and here are the main reasons why!
Book Review: Vanishing Daughters
Content warnings: murder, death, parent death, violence, gore, stalking, kidnapping, corpses, mentions of rape and sexual assault (Please read at your discretion!)
Summary: 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.
It Reads Like An Old Fairytale
We think everyone should know by now just how dark the original versions of fairy tales were. But Vanishing Daughters takes it a step further and makes it even more dark in more modern times. The prose of this book had us hanging onto every word. It’s atmospheric and haunting. We felt just as trapped in Bri’s world as she did. And we couldn’t help feeling unsettled the closer she got to stopping the murderer.
Everything Unknown
Between grieving her late mother and maintaining her relationships to having the most terrible nightmares, Bri has enough to worry about. Enter the perspective of a strangling serial killer. The Chicago Strangler targets beautiful young women and somehow traps them in a liminal space. We didn’t know who was narrating each chapter right away, and that added to the suspense even more.
Cynthia Pelayo’s Vanishing Daughters retells the classic “Sleeping Beauty” in a heart-racing new format that will have you questioning life and existence itself.
Vanishing Daughters by Cynthia Pelayo releases March 11th, and you can order a copy of it here!
What do you think of Cynthia Pelayo’s new gothic thriller, Vanishing Daughters? Let us know on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram!
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