One by one, three young girls vanish in Aurelius, a small town in upstate New York. With the first disappearance, the townspeople begin to mistrust outsiders. When the second girl goes missing, neighbors and childhood friends start to eye one another warily. And with the third disappearance, the sleepy little town awakens to a full-blown nightmare.

In The Church of Dead Girls, Stephen Dobyns probes the ruinous effects of suspicion. No one is immune, not the respected editor of the local paper, nor the demure cashier at the pharmacy, nor even the narrator, a high school biology teacher, observed baking cookies with young girls and helping them with their homework.

As the panic mounts and the citizens take the law into their own hands, old rumors, old angers, and old hungers come to the surface to reveal the secret history of this seemingly genteel town and the dark impulses of its inhabitants. Written with an uncanny awareness of the intricacies of human nature, The Church of Dead Girls is both a gripping story about the corrosive effects of fear and a chilling psychological thriller.