The doll existed before the kidnapping.

Eighteen months after five-year-old Mia Dawson disappeared, her mother sees her again on a stranger’s livestream. She is sitting at the end of a child-sized table in a yellow chair, surrounded by hyperrealistic dolls, while thousands of viewers watch. The woman behind the camera calls her Annie. Kate knows better. She recognizes the split in Mia’s thumbnail, the notch in her ear, and the tiny details no artist should have been able to recreate by accident.

Nicole Perry has built an enormous online following around her seventeen “children,” complete with birthdays, favorite foods, bedtime routines, family photographs, and personalities her followers know by heart. Annie has been part of that family since before Mia vanished, which should make Kate’s theory impossible. Then the girl moves again. Police search Nicole’s home and find exactly what Nicole says they will find: dolls. Kate is left with one choice. If she wants to know what is really happening inside that house, she has to get close enough to see it for herself.

Using a false name, Kate takes a temporary job inside Nicole’s carefully staged world. Behind the cameras, locked rooms, household rules, and perfectly arranged family moments, she discovers something far worse than a woman obsessed with lifelike dolls. Children are being taught new names, new memories, and new versions of themselves. They learn when they are allowed to move, when they are allowed to speak, and how to become perfectly still when the red light comes on. Beside each living child is a copy convincing enough to take their place.

Mia is alive, but she is no longer the five-year-old Kate has spent eighteen months trying to bring home. The deeper Kate gets into Nicole’s system, the more she realizes that finding her daughter was only the beginning. To get Mia out, Kate will have to survive a house built to make truth look like obsession, convince people who have already been taught what to believe, and face the possibility that loving the child who came home means letting go of the child she lost.

PLAY DEAD is an uncanny psychological horror novel about missing children, manufactured memories, online spectators, and the terrifying power of a story repeated until everyone accepts it as truth. Sometimes the easiest way to hide a child is to put her where everyone can see her.