The Walkaways

When People Vanish, What If Something Is Calling Them Away?

Detective Kyle Mercer has spent years haunted by disappearances that make no sense: abandoned vehicles, no signs of violence, and victims who seem to simply vanish. When another person disappears in rural Citrus County, Florida, Kyle discovers a disturbing pattern linking the new case to mysteries he has never been able to solve.

At the same time, psychologist Emily Mercer notices troubling similarities among patients struggling with grief, trauma, and despair, while Veraxon BioPharm executive Amora Davies is drawn into the mystery after someone she loves disappears. Their investigations eventually converge around Veraxon CEO Ashen Thorn, experimental memory technology, and a possibility far more unsettling than any ordinary crime.

Blending psychological suspense, supernatural mystery, and emotional drama, The Walkaways explores memory, grief, identity, love, and what can happen when hope begins to disappear.

Discover The Walkaways and enter a mystery where some who vanish return changed—and most never return at all.

Excerpt from the book

The call came at 2:47 a.m., but he was already awake.

Kyle Mercer lay in the lightless bedroom like a man rehearsing his own burial, eyes open and dry, staring into the darkness as the house settled around him like a tomb. The air conditioner groaned as it cycled on, a low, arthritic sound, like something old waking from its slumber. Outside, the oak scraped a branch against the bedroom window with slow, rhythmic persistence, the way the dead might knock if they had forgotten they were no longer welcome among the living.

He had spent the last hour doing everything in his considerable power not to think about the Delray file. It lay on the table in the den, thirty feet away, yet he could feel it throbbing in his brain like a migraine.

It had been three weeks since Marcus Delray had simply ceased to exist. Uniformed deputies had found his SUV resting on the shoulder of County Road 44, hazard lights flashing amber into the darkness like a distress beacon from a ghost ship.

There were no witnesses, no body, no blood. The officers could not locate any drag marks or signs of violence.

It was as though something had reached through the skin of the world and lifted the victim out of it, the way a child might pluck an ant from the sidewalk. He ended up as another name added to the ledger. Just another manila folder destined for the endless filing cabinet of people who had stepped sideways out of their own lives and into whatever waited beyond the ordinary.

His phone vibrated against the nightstand like a trapped insect.

Kyle leaned over and glanced at the screen. It read: Tommy Tanner. He was the department’s youngest road deputy. Twenty-three years old and soft-faced. A babe, barely out of college.

Kyle’s stomach sank the way it always did at that hour. There was something about calls that came between midnight and dawn. In his seventeen years of law enforcement, nothing good had ever arrived at 2:47 a.m. Those hours belonged to the devil himself.

He reluctantly answered.

“Mercer,” he grumbled.

“Detective Mercer.” Tommy’s voice was careful. Too careful, as if the kid was gripping his composure with both hands, squeezing hard enough to leave fingerprints on it.

“Sorry to bother you at this hour, but you know how it is. I’m out on 44 West, a quarter mile past the Lecanto crossover. We got a situation.”

Kyle was already sitting up, moving with the careful stillness of a man navigating a minefield, trying not to wake Emily, who slept beside him. She breathed slow and even, dreaming whatever clean dreams she was still permitted. His feet touched the cold tile, and the cold moved straight up through the soles of his feet and settled somewhere in his chest, where it intended to stay. He shuffled toward the living room and the darkness that waited there, patient and familiar.