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Now Available: Where Voices Go to Hide

 

A Haunting New Phone-Anxiety Thriller by Angela Grey


What happens when every telephone call reveals more than the person on the other end intends to say? Where Voices Go to Hide, the first novel in Angela Grey’s new Phone Anxiety Thriller series, is now available.

Elena Sterling has always dreaded answering the phone. The ringing triggers an immediate surge of fear—the racing heart, tightened chest, shallow breathing, and overwhelming urge to let the call go unanswered. But Elena’s fear is not simply ordinary phone anxiety. When she finally answers, she hears two voices. One belongs to the person speaking. The other reveals what they are trying desperately to conceal. Buried beneath polite greetings and carefully chosen words, Elena hears fragments of terror, guilt, resentment, and violence. She hears thoughts that were never meant to leave the safety of another person’s mind.

Then an unknown woman calls Elena’s fiancé. The woman’s voice sounds controlled, but beneath it Elena hears panic. She also hears a thought belonging to her fiancé, Theo Lockhart: Not again. Those two words open the door to a pattern of missing women, carefully protected secrets, and a past Theo refuses to explain. As Elena begins questioning everything she believed about the man she loves, the telephone becomes both her greatest source of evidence and the instrument of her deepest fear. Every call brings her closer to the truth. Every voice gives her another reason not to trust anyone. And someone already knows what Elena can hear.

A Thriller Born from a Real Fear 

Where Voices Go to Hide was inspired in part by my own experience with phone anxiety, sometimes called telephobia. For people who experience it, an incoming call can cause genuine emotional and physical distress. The sound of a ringing telephone may trigger dread, racing thoughts, nausea, trembling, difficulty breathing, or an intense fear of saying the wrong thing. Even listening to a voicemail or returning a routine call can feel overwhelming.

I wanted to explore what might happen if someone already terrified of telephone conversations suddenly had an even greater reason to fear answering. What if every caller carried a hidden voice? What if silence felt safer—but answering was the only way to stop something terrible?

About the Novel

Blending psychological suspense, relationship secrets, missing-person mystery, and the claustrophobic fear of unwanted communication, Where Voices Go to Hide follows a woman whose unusual ability forces her to confront truths that others have spent years concealing. The novel explores:

Phone anxiety and the fear of unexpected communication
Secrets hidden within intimate relationships
The difference between spoken words and private intentions
Manipulation, obsession, and buried guilt
The dangerous consequences of believing you alone can hear the truth

This is a dark, atmospheric thriller for readers who enjoy morally complicated characters, unsettling domestic secrets, psychological tension, and stories in which the person uncovering the mystery may be hiding something too.

The Beginning of a New Series

Where Voices Go to Hide introduces the Phone Anxiety Thriller series, a collection of suspense novels centered on telephone calls, concealed voices, private fears, and the terrible things people reveal when they believe no one can hear what they are truly thinking.

The next installment, A Frequency of Secrets, is currently in development. The telephone may stop ringing. The voices do not.

Get Your Copy

Where Voices Go to Hide by Angela Grey is now available in paperback and ebook formats. Step into Elena Sterling’s world—but think carefully before answering the next call. Some voices speak aloud. Others wait beneath the words. And some truths should never be heard.

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Editorial Backlog Released

I’m announcing a backlog of titles recently released thanks to a clear in the editorial manuscript queue. Previously, I had to obtain a co-author’s approval before making edits and sending them forward. Now, I’m moving forward temporarily without a co-author (whose medical career has progressively come front and center over the past year), so I’ve sole decision-making over what gets approved and when. As of the end of last year, there were four titles in the pipeline awaiting publication.

Since Ghosted Buried Gone and Long Since Drowned, both from the same series, were written in tandem, they’ve been released from the draft inventory together. North of Ordinary is just a bunch of magazine submissions about Midwest small towns that didn’t go anywhere, compiled into a book of short stories for the content queue. And Echoes Along the Shore is a novel written last year, close to its series predecessor, that’s been waiting in the wings.

A Catalog of Small Cruelties was a NaNoWriMo monthly writing challenge that I got the idea from a mainstream news piece on a woman who woke up from a coma thinking she had children. Everything beyond the idea was imagination-based.

Also written simultaneously were Ships That Cross in the Night and In My Life, which share a similar grounding, as both came from teenage scenarios from a mishmash of diaries and imaginary connections that developed out of an angst-ridden late eighties Bismarck, North Dakota, adolescence and were then fictionalized and separated into two different plots. One is a soulmate’s story that will be the first in the series, and the other is a standalone novel about soulmates who met in their teens and reconnected later in life.

Those are going through edits at present and will be published as soon as they’re available. Be sure to check out ShadyOakPress.com for information on past books.

All book covers were done by the Ukrainian graphic designers at GetCovers.com.

 

Featured

North of Ordinary: Short Stories That Live in the Quiet Between Things

A Midwestern atmospheric literary fiction collection rooted in place, season, and complicated lives

Some towns don’t change. They just learn how to hide it better.
In the northern Midwest, ordinary lives bend quietly, until they don’t.

In the quiet towns and backroads of the northern Midwest, nothing stays buried forever.

Set against apple orchards, corn mazes, gravel roads, and wind-cut fields, North of Ordinary is a literary short story collection that traces the

Blending contemporary literary fiction with the textures of rural America, this collection captures the quiet drama of people caught between obligation and desire, memory and reinvention. Each story is grounded in Midwestern landscapes—where the air carries cider, dust, and something unsaid—and where even the smallest decision can echo.

Perfect for readers who love:

  • character-driven fiction and emotionally resonant storytelling
  • small town drama and layered relationships
  • atmospheric literary fiction with a strong sense of place
  • coming-of-age themes, family tension, and quiet unravelings
  • the work of Elizabeth Strout, Annie Proulx, and Raymond Carver

North of Ordinary is a collection about what lingers—
in towns that remember,
in families that fracture and hold,
and in the long, quiet moment before a life changes course.

In My Life Is Finally Here: A Story Worth the Wait

After an unexpected delay during the editing process, I’m thrilled to announce that In My Life has officially been published! While the extra time wasn’t part of the original plan, it allowed the manuscript to become the strongest version of itself, and I couldn’t be happier to finally share this story with readers.

To celebrate the release, I’m also excited to unveil the brand-new book trailer and enhanced Amazon A+ Content, giving readers an even deeper look into the heart of In My Life. The new trailer captures the emotion, nostalgia, and enduring spirit woven throughout the story, while the Amazon A+ pages offer an engaging visual introduction to the book, its themes, and the journey behind it.

A Story Rooted in Memory, Family, and Place

In My Life is a heartfelt reflection on family, resilience, love, loss, and the moments that shape who we become. Through richly drawn characters and deeply personal experiences, the novel explores the connections between generations and the landscapes that leave lasting impressions on our hearts.

One of the inspirations behind the story comes from my own memories of growing up around the Missouri River bottoms south of Bismarck, an area affectionately known by locals simply as “the desert.”

Those windswept fields, cottonwood groves, riverbanks, and quiet off-road back roads provided the backdrop for countless teen adventures and moments of reflection. As I wrote In My Life, I often found myself reminiscing about those special places and the people who made them unforgettable. While I did alter the people’s histories to protect the real-life adolescents back then, my thoughts of them still swirl in my mind from time to time, as do those of that location. That sense of place became an important thread woven throughout the novel.

Highlights Readers Can Look Forward To  Discovering:

  • A moving story of family bonds that endure through life’s greatest joys and challenges.
  • Vivid settings inspired by the landscapes of North Dakota and the Missouri River.
  • Characters whose hopes, struggles, and triumphs feel authentic and relatable.
  • Themes of faith, perseverance, healing, and the lasting power of memory.
  • A celebration of the places we come from and how they continue to shape us throughout our lives.

Thank You for Your Patience

I want to sincerely thank everyone who waited so patiently while In My Life made its way through the final stages of editing and publication. Your encouragement, messages, and enthusiasm have meant more than you know.

Now the wait is over, and I’m excited to finally place this story into your hands. I hope you’ll enjoy watching the new book trailer, exploring the enhanced Amazon A+ Content, and, most importantly, experiencing the journey of In My Life for yourself.

Thank you for being part of this incredible journey. I can’t wait to hear what you think of the story.

A Catalog of Small Cruelties

A Catalog of Small Cruelties

Another one of my novels came out of editorial backlog, and I’m so excited.

She wakes from a coma grieving children who never existed.
A coma gives Violet Holloway three dead children—and a reason to punish the living.
Every victim has a secret. Violet has a catalog.

There are some griefs so complete they begin to invent their own evidence.

When twenty-eight-year-old architect Violet Holloway wakes from a coma after a devastating car accident, she remembers three dead children no one else believes ever existed. Not her polished attorney husband, Silas Holloway. Not her exhausted social worker sister, Piper Langston. Not the doctors, the police, or the photographs that insist Violet had been alone that night.

Back home in their affluent Midwestern suburb, Violet begins writing a private manuscript she calls A Catalog of Small Cruelties—a meditation on motherhood, memory, neglect, and the terrible things people allow to happen to children when no one is looking.

Then the bodies begin appearing.

A disgraced foster parent abandoned in an orchard house.
A father left on a frozen trail.
A woman discovered beside a riverbank.
A corpse arranged inside a library after closing.
Another found at a campground swallowed by fog.

Each victim shares a chilling connection: somewhere in the exhausted late-night conversations of Piper’s child welfare caseload, their names had once surfaced beside accusations of neglect.

As detectives close in and the city spirals into fear, Violet’s grief begins to look less like trauma and more like design. Because the deeper her manuscript goes, the clearer one horrifying truth becomes:

Violet is not simply documenting the tragedy.

She is curating it.

Haunting, literary, and razor-sharp, A Catalog of Small Cruelties is a psychologically devastating suspense novel about invented motherhood, moral obsession, and the stories people tell themselves to survive the unbearable.

Echoes Along the Shore book release

The forests whisper, rivers bleed, and Superior keeps its echoes. Campers think they’re hunting a killer, but the wilderness hides more than storms. In the mist, one truth cuts clear: the danger is already among them.

Some places keep secrets. This one keeps the dead.

Echoes Along the Shore is a place-driven psychological thriller where the landscape exerts agency, truth emerges through pattern recognition, and survival is both the protagonist’s greatest strength—and her most dangerous liability. The same instincts that kept her alive are pulling her deeper

They came for fresh air, campfires, and peace.
They found that some campers won’t survive the weekend.
And one of them may never have planned to.

On the edge of Lake Superior, the next echo could be your last.

After surviving a string of brutal murders in their hometown, Leah, Nick, and Jake escape north, hoping the vast wilderness of Minnesota’s Arrowhead region will offer peace to forest bathe. Instead, the forests of Tettegouche and the roaring rivers bleeding into the great lake draw them into a nightmare more cunning than anything they left behind.

Gripping, atmospheric, and merciless, Echoes Along the Shore is a psychological survival thriller that asks: what if the deadliest predator isn’t lurking in the woods at all, but stoking a fire nearby?

Perfect for readers of atmospheric psychological thrillers, survival suspense, and character-driven mysteries set against the haunting landscapes of the western Great Lakes & upper Midwest, where the lake has already decided what it will give back .

Thrillers of survival. Dark fairytales of resilience.

Welcome. I’m Angela Ellen Grey — author, artist, and a believer in the kind of stories that make you feel your pulse.

 

I write for the girls who stayed awake.
For the ones who walked home alone.
For the dreamers who step through the wrong doorway and discover they’re stronger than anyone expected.

Every story is a doorway.
Some we hesitate to open.
Some we run through screaming.
Some are carved inside us —
until we become the threshold.

🔪 The Dakota Killer Thrillers

Everything she survived made her dangerous.
The kind of girl who lives through one killer doesn’t run from the next.

Meet Laci O’Neil — survivor, sister, reluctant fighter. She doesn’t go looking for trouble…, but in the Dakotas, trouble finds girls like her. Each book uncovers a new predator hiding behind the quiet of small towns and wide-open land. Different killers. Same silence. Laci refuses to look away.

If you love:

  • Missing girls who get found because someone refuses to stop searching
  • Rural noir with teeth
  • Survivors who aren’t done fighting

This is your next obsession.

📚 Start with: Long Since Buried
➡️ Continue the hunt in Since You’ve Been Gone
🩸 Forthcoming: Ghosted Buried Gone + Long Since Drowned

🌙 The Dreamcatcher Dark Fantasy Series

What if your nightmares were looking back?

Dash never meant to touch the dreamcatcher her grandmother made — but once she falls into Baumwelt, a dark, enchanted world stitched from fear and forgotten tales, nothing will ever be safe again.
Not in the dreams.
Not in the waking.

Because some dreams protect you.
Others hunt you.

If you crave:

  • Creepy forests and whispered warnings
  • Indigenous-inspired magic realism
  • Fairytales with bite

Let me show you the stairway through the clouds.

📚 Begin with: Dreamcatcher: A Hidden World Fairy Tale Fantasy

✨ Why I Write These Stories

My worlds are shaped by the land — the plains, the rivers, the woods that hold secrets older than we are, by the whispers of the ancestors. By the too-real fears we try to outgrow, by the ordinary girls who choose to fight back anyway.

Whether the monster is a man
or a shadow made of teeth —
My characters rise.

Because survival isn’t just making it out alive.
It’s refusing to stay silent afterward.

🔗 Join the Journey

Be the first to know when the next body is found —
or the next portal opens.

📬 Join my newsletter for exclusive bonus stories, case files, and dream-lore.
🎤 Book clubs and libraries — I’d love to visit.

Thanks for stepping into the dark with me.
Let’s leave the lights off a little longer. 🌑✨

Novelist of YA Psychological Mysteries, YA Fantasy Books & Dark Noir Suspense Thrillers

Stories that survive the dark... Where girls fight back and nightmares have teeth.

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