The Day the Children Vanished

From the creative mind of Hugh Pentecost comes a terrifying and prophetic novel that potentially influenced the Chowchilla kidnapping in 1976. The Day the Children Vanished is not for the faint of heart, as readers are taken down the rabbit hole of the mysterious disappearance of nine children, the school bus they rode on, and its driver.

On a bright, clear winter afternoon, nine children in the town of Clayton disappeared from the face of the earth on their commute to the Regional School of Lakeview. Missing with the children are the bus in which they traveled and its driver…​

They vanished completely. So mysteriously so that some distraught citizen of Clayton suggest it was as if they’d been sucked up into outer space by a monstrous interplanetary vacuum cleaner.

Dive into the mysterious, twisted mind of the winner of the Grand Master Award from Mystery Writers of America and see for yourself just how the nine children of Clayton disappeared that winter.

One of Hugh Pentecost’s most tantalizing stories, Pentecost has “a certain hand and a crafty mind” (The New Yorker).

Hugh Pentecost is a pseudonym for the award-winning author Judson Philips. He wrote more than one hundred mystery novels, including the Pierre Chambrun series, the Julian Quist series, and the John Jericho series.