virginia s. anderson

The only person still looking for university professor Sarah Crockett’s lost daughter is Sarah. ＂Give up on all those fairy-tale stories,＂ her ex-husband tells her. ＂Kidnapped kids don’t come back when they’ve been gone five years.＂

You should know, she wants to tell him. Since you killed her.

Did he? Maybe her child is still out there. Waiting for her mother to find her. But no one else will ask the questions it will take to find out.

Until into her life walks Russell Pierce, a software magnate who also has a lost daughter. Pierce was tried for killing his wife; only a mistrial saved him. Now as the cops search for evidence to retry him, eighteen-year-old Thomasina is running from him. The girl has good reason to be frightened: she testified that she saw her father at the crime scene.

＂I have money,＂ Pierce tells Sarah. ＂I can help you find out what happened to your daughter if you’ll help me make peace with mine.＂

For Sarah it’s a devil’s bargain. Does Pierce want her help finding his daughter so he can kill her to hide what she knows? But Sarah’s search for her child has been her obsession, and now here’s the first faint hope of answers in five years. If only she can prove Pierce innocent so she can accept this seductive offer. To find out she must plunge into a virtual universe where new digital magic mixes reality with illusion. Even what her eyes show her may be fake. Her search traps her in a mind-twisting battle with a menacing cyberstalker who may be a computerized invention-or Pierce himself.

The three books of The Sarah Crockett Mysteries: Among the Lost Children trace Sarah’s search for her daughter and her own sanity as she makes desperate choices that test her courage and will. In Book 1, Among the Bones, she begins to learn what getting answers will cost her. She discovers more than she was looking for.