8 Unsettling Mysteries Where Mothers Go Missing

Stan and Joy Delaney have been married for 50 years and are the envy of all their friends. Their marriage seems perfect, and they have four wonderful children, now all grown up. And yet, behind closed doors, Stan and Joy are miserable. One night, a stranger named Savannah knocks on the couple’s door. She’s bleeding after a fight with her boyfriend, and Stan and Joy are more than happy to offer her help. But then Savannah goes missing, and Joy is nowhere to be found. Now the police turn to question the only person that remains: Stan. Two of Stan’s children believe their father is innocent. The other two are not so sure. But what is the truth, and what secrets is Stan hiding?

Jason’s sister Hayden is a former addict who cut ties with her family when she was at her lowest point. Now, she’s clean and sober and desperate for her brother’s help. She needs Jason and his wife to take care of her teenage daughter while she handles some business in town. But Hayden never returns, and the mystery of her disappearance brings up a lot of unsettling memories from Jason’s past.

In The Watcher, detective Kateri Fisher investigates a curious case. Pearl Jenkins is a hermit in the woods who is basically a nobody. But all of that changes when she vanishes, leaving behind a pool of blood and a child nobody knew existed. As somewhat of an outsider herself, Kateri finds it fitting that she’s taken on this case that no one else wants. But the closer she gets to the truth, the more she realizes she and Pearl might not have been as invisible as she once thought.

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives alone with his father. His mother Margaret, a Chinese American poet, disappeared when Bird was only 9 years old. Bird doesn’t know what happened to her, but he does know her books have been banned and that she always seemed to care about her writing more than she cared about him. After Bird receives a mysterious letter, he’s pulled into a quest to uncover the whereabouts of him missing mother.

When 17-year-old Anne’s mother goes missing, Anne isn’t too worried at first. Her mom has always been quirky, and she often took mysterious business trips. But when Anne’s mother isn’t home several days later, Anne starts to become concerned. When she tries to hotel number her mom left her, it’s disconnected, and a strange man keeps calling their home, looking for a woman who doesn’t even live there. Who is Anne’s mother, really? And where is she? The answers to these questions will change everything Anne thought she knew.

So-nyo goes missing in a Seoul subway station, separated from her husband among the crowds of people. As her husband and children try to search for her, they realize that none of them have a recent picture of So-nyo. This realization leads to bigger questions about how well the children know the woman they call Mom. Please Look After Mom is told through alternating perspectives, weaving together a version of So-nyo as she is seen by others, and eventually how she sees herself.

Five Days Gone is a true crime memoir about a real mother who went missing. But it was before she was a mom. When Laura Cumming’s mother was only 3 years old, she was kidnapped from a beach on the Lincolnshire coast of England. But despite how shocking this incident was, no one in her family ever talked about it. In fact Laura’s mom’s family intentionally hid it from her. And this was far from the only secret they kept from her. Now, years later, Laura and her mother search for answers.

The Women Could Fly is more dystopian than it is mystery, but this story is just so good it had to be on this list, especially because it includes a mysterious missing mom.  27-year-old Josephine Thomas has never known why her mother disappeared. But in a world where women have to be married off at 30, the older Jo gets the more she feels like she understands why her mother might have left. When Jo is offered the opportunity to honor one last request from her mother, Jo will leave behind the life she’s always known to feel a connection to her mom one last time.