Strawgirl

In this stirring, insightful follow-up to Child of Silence , San Diego child abuse investigator Bo Bradley puts her job and her life in jeopardy with her efforts to clear an accused child molester. When three-year-old Samantha Franer dies after being raped, police suspect her mother's boyfriend Paul Massieu. But he has already taken Samantha's eight-year-old sister Hannah from school and headed to the upstate New York camp of the Seekers, a group of people who believe they've had contact with extraterrestrials. Self-aggrandizing psychologist Cynthia Ganage claims that Samantha was the victim of ritual Satanic abuse and is convinced that this ``cult'' membership proves Massieu's guilt. Bo, who is sent to retrieve Hannah and place her in protective custody, is not sure she agrees. When Massieu is arrested, Bo allows the emotionally frail Hannah to remain with her adopted grandmother, who owns the Seekers' headquarters. All hell breaks loose when the girls' mother commits suicide and Ganage is murdered: the media takes up the Satanism cry, and Bo is in deep trouble with her supervisor as she hunts for the real child molester. A corker of an ending, in which the killer hunts down Bo during a storm, aptly rounds out this tale enriched by its taboo-shattering frankness about Bo's struggle with her manic-depressive illness. (Feb.)