Seventeen-year-old Sophie Calder walks into Chicago Union Station—and vanishes.
No verified camera footage shows her leaving. No witness sees her board a train. Within days, the disappearance of a famous television journalist’s daughter becomes a national obsession.
But moments before she vanished, Sophie sent a chilling message to retired FBI agent Daniel
She had uncovered evidence that someone escaped justice in one of the most celebrated cases of his career.
Years earlier, Hollis rescued fifteen-year-old Lily Benton after nineteen days in captivity. The case made him a household name and inspired a nationally televised documentary produced by Sophie’s father. Now Sophie has discovered an unedited interview suggesting the official story was incomplete—and that someone connected to Lily’s abduction may still be hiding the truth.
Grant Calder hires the Hollis Group, a nationally recognized missing-persons firm based in downtown St. Louis, to find his daughter. Hollis and his team follow Sophie’s trail through train stations, digital accounts, deleted recordings, and conflicting witness statements. But every new discovery raises another disturbing question.
Was Sophie abducted because of what she found?
Did she disappear voluntarily to expose a secret?
Or is someone manipulating the investigation—and the millions of people watching it unfold?
As the media frenzy intensifies and carefully constructed stories begin to collapse, Hollis must confront the possibility that the case that built his reputation was never truly solved.
And somewhere, Sophie Calder is running out of time.
Last Seen Alive is a gripping missing-person mystery about buried evidence, media manipulation, family secrets, and the dangerous difference between the story the public is told and the truth someone is willing to kill to protect.
The first novel in The Hollis Group Missing Persons Files.