... so riveting it kept me up too late trying to get to the end. Written by a well known author, under the pen name of Haylen Beck, published in 2017. Why he could not publish the book under his own name of Stuart Neville I will never know. I took the book with me to work this morning at 6 a.m., hoping I could finish it during my lunch break. I was up 'way too late reading when I knew I had to get up to be at work at six a.m., but desperately needed for that mother to find her children and get them away from the abductors who had stolen them.
Audra was driving across country, leaving an abusive husband, headed for California where she thought she had a friend who would take them in. With two youngsters in the back seat, she had been driving for days, was mentally and physically exhausted. She was pulled over by a sheriff in very rural Arizona, who claimed he found drugs in her car when he searched without her permission or a warrant. Audra was taken to jail, and the children were spirited away by a deputy, taken to a very remote cabin in the mountains and locked up. The children were frightened, the mother was not believed when she tried to convince federal authorities that law enforcement had abducted the kids.
The book was very well written, a tight plot that read as if it were a screen play: the kind of story that you readily envision being made into a movie or television script. I was really anxious just reading, rushing to turn pages and help Audra get free from confinement and get to the children. Very realistic, making me think about the permanent scars this family would struggle with from the stress of their experience of being abused by authority figures. You think you should teach your children to be cooperative and respectful of law enforcement personnel - but in this case, those people you had trained them to believe and trust were the ones who were most dangerous.
No comments:
Post a Comment