The Vanishing Children

In the heart of the American West, some children don't find homes. They simply vanish. Millbrook, Kansas, 1884. For telegraph operator Sarah Chen, life is a matter of precision. The crisp clicks of her telegraph key and the meticulous entries in her logbooks form a bulwark against a town that has never fully accepted her. But the rigid order of her world is shattered when the monthly Orphan Train arrives with one child missing from the manifest-a boy who exists on paper but not on the platform .
The official explanation is a sudden illness, a clerical error easily dismissed . But Sarah's trained eyes see past the lies. Her search for a single, phantom child pulls her into the town's dark underbelly, where she uncovers a horrifying conspiracy shielded by Christian charity. Millbrook's most powerful citizens-a pious clergyman, a respected judge, and a wealthy widow-are not saving children; they are selling them.
Using her unique access to the town's secrets, Sarah deciphers a hidden language of commerce in the telegraph wires-a network that trades children like "premium merchandise" and sets prices for "sturdy boys" and "fair-haired girls" . The system is vast, its corruption reaching the highest levels of power, and its methods are a chilling perversion of history itself. Now, the architects of this monstrous enterprise know she is watching.
They've marked her for a "tragic accident, " a problem to be permanently solved . As a lone woman hunted by the very men who control the law, Sarah must trust a small band of unlikely allies and race against time to expose the truth before the next train arrives-and before she becomes the next soul to vanish without a trace.