Anónimo

When Misty was six years old, her family started to live and dress like the Amish. Misty and her sister were kept as slaves on a mountain ranch where they were subjected to almost complete isolation, sexual abuse, and extreme physical violence. When Misty reached her teens, her parents feared she and her sister would escape and took them to an Amish community where they were adopted and became baptized members. Misty was devastated to once again find herself in a world of fear, animal cruelty, and sexual abuse.

The year was 1975, and at age 16, young Keri was desperate to strike out on her own. However, as listeners of the first three volumes of this series will know, her childhood was hardly the loving, supportive, preparatory period it should have been. Should it really be any surprise then, after such a traumatic baptism into life, that her first foray into the adult world was hardly an unmitigated success? But just when she thought she'd finally left her demons behind, she found herself at the mercy of unsavoury characters yet again - and this time, without anyone to turn to...

The horrific 1988 murder of four-year-old Barbara Jean Horn shocked the citizens of Philadelphia. Plucked from her own front yard, Barbara Jean was found dead less than two and a half hours later in a cardboard TV box dragged to a nearby street curb. After months of investigation with no strong leads, the case went cold. Four years later it was reopened, and Walter Ogrod, a young man with autism spectrum disorder who had lived across the street from the family at the time of the murder, was brought in as a suspect.

From the outside, there was no reason to suspect the family life of young schoolchild Keri was anything but unremarkable. Two loving parents, a backdrop of 1960s Britain; life had provided for her, at least with the riches of modesty. Keri herself however, would often confound teachers with her erratic behaviour, which was at best sullen and withdrawn; at worst violently disruptive. When challenged, she would only exacerbate her growing reputation as a fantasist; weaving terrible tales about the "abuse" she was suffering at the hands of her very creators.

Tim and Susannah have ordinary lives on the surface. He's a mortician for whom death is a serious business, and she's a chef who really knows her way around a knife. And if the neighbors in their small Midwestern town knew of her dark hobby, they'd run for the hills. Raised by an apathetic mother and a cruel father, Susannah was bullied and pushed to her breaking point long before she met mild-mannered Tim, and learned to channel her murderous impulses into a strange form of art, which keeps her clueless husband safe...for now.

Brooke Nolan is a battered child who makes an anonymous phone call about the escalating brutality in her home. When social services jeopardize her safety, condemning her to keep her father's secret, it's a glass of spilled milk at the dinner table that forces her to speak about the cruelty she's been hiding. In her pursuit of safety and justice, Brooke battles a broken system that pushes to keep her father in the home.

A light in the darkness for severely troubled children, former special education teacher Torey Hayden faced three of her most extraordinary challenges after she left the classroom. Nine-year-old Cassandra, kidnapped by her father and found starving, dirty, and picking through garbage cans - a child prone to long silences and erratic, violent behavior, whose hard-won recollections of the nightmare she endured could not be fully trusted.