Audrey ValezThe Series
The Mystery Files
Each volume takes one corner of the strange and stays there for twenty cases. Books one and two are finished. There are more in progress.
Gone Without a Trace: They Vanished and Were Never Found
A white Chevrolet Cavalier sat at the end of a quiet Nevada cul-de-sac with Christmas presents still on the back seat. At 11:54 in the morning, a security camera caught Steven Koecher walking east along the sidewalk, around the corner, and out of his own life.
We carry phones that track us, and there's a camera over the door of every shop and hotel and parking garage. Vanishing completely should not be possible anymore.
It keeps happening anyway.
Gone Without a Trace collects twenty people who stepped out of an ordinary day and were never seen again, from a Vermont hiking trail in 1946 to a sunflower field past the fence at a Bulgarian airport. A couple of them made national headlines. The rest barely made the local paper. Every one of them left a family that is still waiting.
Twenty unsolved disappearances. Read them with the lights on.
Double Lives: True Stories of the Strangers Among Us
Nobody warns you about the people you already know.
We teach our children to be careful around strangers, and we build our caution around unfamiliar faces and numbers we don't recognize. Nobody prepares us for the man who has been sleeping beside us for twenty-five years.
Double Lives collects twenty people who were trusted completely while living somebody else's life entirely. A French drifter who convinced a grieving Texas family he was their missing son, and a Member of Parliament who left his clothes folded on a Miami beach and started over in Australia under another name.
Most of these cases were solved. We know what happened, who did it, and how long it went on. What the facts never explain is why someone looks at the people who love them and decides, quietly and patiently, to build a second life alongside the first.
There's no stranger to blame in these pages. There's only the person whose shoes are already by the front door.
More to come
There are more volumes in progress.
When one is finished, I say so to my mailing list before I say it anywhere else.
Join the mailing list