A suspenseful thriller about a young babysitter who uses her wits and a big dose of courage as she attempts to save herself and the toddler in her care from kidnappers.

The girl looked so peaceful, she could have been asleep. Except her eyes were open, blankly reflecting the flickering flames spreading towards her... When firefighters discover the body of a teenage girl at an abandoned house, Detective Amanda Steele hurries to the scene. Dumfries, Virginia is a small town, yet no one seems to have any idea who the dead girl is until Amanda finds a dragonfly pin with the name Crystal engraved on it. Working tirelessly, Amanda traces the pin to Crystal Foster, a thirteen-year-old who disappeared three years ago from her wealthy parents' home. Breaking the news to the distraught parents won't be easy, but the loss of her own daughter still haunts Amanda, and she knows this will bring them closure. But when Amanda goes to see the Fosters, they do not recognize the girl. She isn't Crystal. Before Amanda can react to this new development, she gets an urgent call. A fire has consumed another vacant house, and the remains of two more girls have been found. Who are these girls, and why are they being picked off? Amanda must stop this killer before the pattern continues, and the death toll climbs. When Amanda receives a taunting note from the killer, she realizes that she holds the missing piece of this puzzle. The victims are connected to Amanda's past, to a case she can never forget, and which almost claimed her life. As she follows the clues to their deadly conclusion, can she save more innocent lives... even if it risks her own? An unputdownable, pulse-pounding mystery. Fans of Rachel Caine, Lisa Regan and Robert Dugoni will be gripped. Readers love Carolyn Arnold: "OMG YES. This was an amazing book... I couldn't put it down... Best book I read this year." Goodreads reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "My heart is still beating fast! Wow!! By far, one of the best thrillers I've read in a long time!" Goodreads reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

In the middle of the night on April 14, 2014, terrorist group, Boko Haram, abducted 276 girls from their secondary school's dormitory in the town of Chibok, Northeast Nigeria. Over the following days, 57 girls managed to escape. For two years, 219 girls remained missing. During the last four months of 2015, in the heat of the worst of the insurgency, Aisha Muhammed-Oyebode, the CEO of the Murtala Muhammed Foundation (MMF) in Nigeria embarked on a project to interview, photograph, and document the accounts of the parents of each of the missing girls. The MMF's team managed to meet the relatives of 201 of them. In May 2016, the first of the missing students, Aisha Nkeki Ali, was found by the Nigerian military. In the intervening years, 107 more have made it home: four by Nigerian military/ para-military intervention, twenty-one by negotiated release in October 2016, and eighty-two more in May 2017; with both deals brokered by Switzerland and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Increasingly complicated negotiations between the Nigerian Government and Boko Haram continue for the 112 girls who remain captive. For the families of the girls, and for the Chibok community, the trauma of this experience remains a daily reality. Words have a power that numbers can never have. The Stolen Daughters of Chibok is a collection of supplemental essays by acclaimed experts and interviews and photographs of 152 of the 210 Chibok families that were interviewed and photographed. It is a tribute to the girls, which aims to capture their lives before the abduction and to highlight how their families have struggled to cope afterward.

Includes an excerpt from the author's More to life.

A study of the social history and cultural significance of the sisterhoods that sprang up in Victorian Britain, examining the lives of women who pushed the boundaries of what women could do within the Anglican Church and paved the way for modern social workers. So successful were they in organizing and recruiting that they threatened to undermine the ideal of domestic life for women.

With one call, her daughter’s life is on the line. Laurie Ahmadi has worked as a 911 police dispatcher in her quiet Northern California town for almost two decades, but nothing in her nearly twenty years of experience could prepare her for the worst call of her career—her teenage daughter, Jojo, is on the other end of the line. She is drugged, disoriented, and in pain, and even though the whole police department springs into action, there is nothing Laurie can do to help. Jojo, who has been sexually assaulted, doesn’t remember how she ended up at the home of Kevin Leeds, a pro football player famous for his work with the Citizens Against Police Brutality movement, though she insists he would never hurt her. And she has no idea where her best friend, Harper, who was with her earlier in the evening, could be. As Jojo and Laurie begin digging into Harper’s private messages on social media to look for clues to her whereabouts, they uncover a conspiracy far bigger than they ever could have imagined. With Kevin’s freedom on the line and the chances of finding Harper unharmed slipping away, Laurie and Jojo begin to realize that they can’t trust anyone to find Harper except themselves, not even the police department they’ve long considered family . . . and time is running out.

Now a Lifetime television movie starring Sarah Drew, Stolen By Their Father was adapted from the story of Pieces of Me: Rescuing My Kidnapped Daughters about a young mother and her daughters face the unimaginable consequences after leaving abuse. In 1994, Lizbeth Meredith said good-bye to her four- and six year-old daughters for a visit with their non-custodial father only to learn days later that they had been kidnapped and taken to their father's home country of Greece. Twenty-nine and just on the verge of making her dreams of financial independence for her and her daughters come true, Lizbeth now faced a $100,000 problem on a $10 an hour budget. For the next two years fueled by memories of her own childhood kidnapping, Lizbeth traded in her small life for a life more public, traveling to the White House and Greece, and becoming a local media sensation in order to garner interest in her efforts. The generous community of Anchorage becomes Lizbeth's makeshift family?one that is replicated by a growing number of Greeks and expats overseas who help Lizbeth navigate the turbulent path leading back to her daughters.

Stolen Childhood is the story of what happened to some 380,000 Polish children who, with their families, were rounded up by Stalin's orders in 1939 and deported into Asiatic Russia. Lucjan Krolikowski, a young seminarian also deported there, shared and witnessed the suffering of his fellow Poles. Freed by an "amnesty," he joined the Polish Army, and when it moved to the Middle East, Lucjan resumed his theology studies, pronounced his vows, and became a chaplain to a Polish military hospital in Egypt. Reassigned to refugee camps in East Africa, Fr. Lucjan and the wandering Polish children met again in 1947 — a meeting that began a long and loving relationship. In 1949 when the Warsaw Communists claimed guardianship of the Polish orphans in Africa and demanded their repatriation, Fr. Lucjan was forced into a world of international intrigue. Called by the Communists "a kidnapper on an international scale," to his orphans, he was the good shepherd who led them to Canada, where he helped his charges overcome the theft of their childhood and become secure adults in a new world. Stolen Childhood is the book of memories he wrote for them, and a cautionary history for people of good will.

"King provides a jarring snapshot of children living in bondage. This compellingly written work is a testament to the strength and resilience of the children and their parents".--"Booklist". "King's deeply researched, well-written, passionate study places children and young adults at center stage in the North American slave experience".--"Choice". 16 photos.

In 1997 journalist Karin Evans walked into an orphanage in southern China and met her new daughter, a beautiful one-year-old baby girl. In this fateful moment Evans became part of a profound, increasingly common human drama that links abandoned Chinese girls with foreigners who have traveled many miles to complete their families. At once a compelling personal narrative and an evocative portrait of contemporary China, The Lost Daughters of China has also served as an invaluable guide for thousands of readers as they navigated the process of adopting from China. However, much has changed in terms of the Chinese government?s policies on adoption since this book was originally published and in this revised and updated edition Evans addresses these developments. Also new to this edition is a riveting chapter in which she describes her return to China in 2000 to adopt her second daughter who was nearly three at the time. Many of the first girls to be adopted from China are now in the teens (China only opened its doors to adoption in the 1990s), and this edition includes accounts of their experiences growing up in the US and, in some cases, of returning to China in search of their roots. Illuminating the real-life stories behind the statistics, The Lost Daughters of China is an unforgettable account of the red thread that winds form China?s orphanages to loving families around the globe.