Winner,
Best Heroine & runner-up in Best Novel in the eFestival of Words Best of
the Independent eBook Awards, 2013
Synopsis:
Down on his luck, Detective Connor Parks
takes solace in the arms of a woman he meets at a local bar, but in the
morning, Claire Fletcher is gone, leaving behind clues to a decade-old mystery.
Abducted at age fifteen, no one has heard from Claire Fletcher in ten years. Until now.
Driven by an unsettling need to see Claire again,
Connor sets out to solve the mystery of her
disappearance once and for all.
The Inspiration for Finding Claire Fletcher:
When I was eleven years old, Jacob Wetterling was
abducted from a small Minnesota town. If
you don’t know the story, Jacob, his brother and a friend were riding their
bikes home from a local store where they had gone to rent a movie. A masked man
with a gun stopped them. He chose Jacob
and told the other boys to run. Jacob’s
brother and friend ran home to alert their babysitter to what had
happened. Jacob was never seen
again.
I remember the news coverage like it was
yesterday. It was one of those
that-could-have-happened-to-me moments in my very young life. I was the same
age as Jacob and I used to ride my bicycle all over my neighborhood without
supervision. Decades passed and I never
forgot Jacob or his mother Patty, who galvanized her community and still runs
the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center which provides all kinds of resources for
families and communities in terms of protecting children. I used that website
when I needed reference materials to help me start talking to my own child
about sensitive issues like strangers and good secret/bad secret.
All
my life I wondered what happened to Jacob. His body was never
recovered. Is he still alive? Every few years a story would appear on
the
national news, reminding us that he might still be out there somewhere.
I would study the age progression photo and
wonder if someone, somewhere, had run into him and not even known it!