Child Kidnapping

Retired and relaxing at the pool on a hot, sunny Texas afternoon was the perfect way to start summer early. Life was perfect. So they thought. Clark and his wife, Jamie, are the proud parents of two adopted girls. Clark is a Christian who became a believer in adulthood. His faith has been his guide and was the foundation of how he and his wife raised the children. Life was perfect. Suddenly, life was not perfect. In fact, Clark and Jamie lived Job’s life from the Old Testament. It seemed as if everything around them was being taken from them. Life was no longer perfect.

It’s a freezing winter’s night in 1954. A baby boy, a few hours old, is left by his mother, wrapped in nothing but two sheets of newspaper and hidden amongst the undergrowth by a canal bank. An hour later, a late-shift postman is walking wearily home when he hears a faint cry. He finds the newspaper parcel and discovers the newborn, white-cold and whimpering, inside. After being rushed to hospital and against all odds, the baby survives. He’s baptised by the hospital chaplain as Richard.

What possesses a mum to kidnap her own child? That's what Maggie asks herself when she's asked to foster 13-year-old Saskia, the subject of a bitter custody battle between her parents. When Saskia's mum Rosa fears the courts are going to favour her ex-husband, James, she takes matters into her own hands. With Rosa facing criminal charges, and Saskia refusing to live with her dad, her future looks uncertain. Will Maggie be able to step in and discover the bombshell that will tear this family apart?

Christina Lattimore’s family is wealthy and powerful. She attends the best private high school. Yet Christina feels trapped by her family’s expectations. Frustrated and angry at her situation, she pays little attention when a strange car follows her home one night. Its headlights are the last thing she remembers until she wakes up in captivity. Christina is terrified when she realizes kidnappers are holding her for ransom. But after her rescue, she faces an even greater shock. Her family thinks she was an accomplice in her own kidnapping! Can she convince them of her innocence?

Manchester, England 1965. Little Kathy Openshaw is waiting in the car, with only her toy doll for company, while her mother Connie visits close friends Myra and Ian. But when Connie returns to the car, Kathy has vanished. Instantly, she thinks of the news reports of the children who have gone missing from the area. Parents everywhere are worried sick. Connie is struck with terror: What kind of mother leaves their child alone, when a kidnapper is on the loose? Listen to this pulse-pounding, heart-wrenching, and unforgettable story.

What do you do when the unthinkable happens? August 8, 2000: A carefree birthday party goes horribly wrong. The children scatter to play hide and seek. But one little girl never returns. Three-year-old Grace has vanished without a trace. Fourteen years later: With the case long since gone cold, Grace's family has done its best to move on. But her sister, Elise, has never given up hope. And now Elise thinks she may have found her.... Is Elise going crazy? Could Grace really have returned? And if she has, where was she taken?

When the abduction of a nine-year-old child sends a small town into a frenzy, Detective Sally Lawson is tasked with finding the person responsible. But when evidence points to a janitor employed at the museum where the child was the last seen, Lawson isn’t sure they’ve caught the right man. Desperate to solve the case before another child disappears, Detective Lawson must uncover the truth before worried parents bring the town to the brink of chaos.

It’s a race through time for 12-year-old Jack Mac Paidin to learn how to use his powers, escape from his evil family members, go back in time to find his grandmother, and solve the mystery of his murdered parents, all before it’s too late.

Resilience isn’t inherited. It’s a hard-fought skill forged by our ability to pick up the broken pieces of our past and remake them into something new. Meet four-year-old Delicia, a poor but carefree child who is about to have her world shattered. Along with her seven-year-old brother Nile, she is kidnapped from her Los Angeles home by her estranged father and taken to Iraq, a foreign world she has never known. This is just the beginning of a string of traumas, hardships, and assaults Delicia will endure throughout her tumultuous childhood.

The book focuses on the 1978 disappearance of Genette Tate. The 13-year-old schoolgirl vanished while out delivering newspapers on her bicycle in the Exeter countryside; no trace of her was ever discovered. With new and rarely seen comments from family, police and inside the courtroom, the story links her case to the earlier abductions of April Fabb (also 13), Christine Markham (9) and Mary Boyle (6).