The Year We Disappeared
A Father - Daughter Memoir
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- 7,49 €
Description de l’éditeur
When Cylin Busby was nine years old, she was obsessed with the Muppets and her pet turtle. Then everything changed. Her police officer father, John, was driving to work when someone levelled a shotgun at his window. The blasts that followed left him clinging to life, yet he managed to write down the name of the only person he thought could have pulled the trigger.
John Busby was scheduled to testify in an upcoming trial against the family of a local criminal with rumoured mob connections. It became clear that there was a definite suspect. Overnight, the Busbys went from being an average family to one under 24-hour armed protection, with police escorts to school and no contact with friends. Worse, the gunman was still on the loose, and it seemed only a matter of time before he would come after John again - or someone else in the family! With few choices left, the Busby family went into hiding, severing all ties to the only life they had ever known.
This hard-hitting, graphic and compelling account of Cylin's family's escape from the mob is ultimately a story of survival and triumph.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
No one with even a marginal interest in true crime writing should miss this page-turner, by turns shocking and almost unbearably sad. In 1979, in an underworld-style hit, a gunman shot John Busby, a policeman in Cape Cod; a fluke saved John's life, but he was permanently disfigured and disabled, and the family placed under 24-hour protection. Eventually the family went into hiding in Tennessee, but arguably their "disappearance" takes place long before they move as John and his daughter, Cylin, alternately narrate, readers can see how the shooting erased the family's sense of themselves. John is consumed with anger at the police's refusal to pursue the likeliest suspects ("and planned to stay angry until I got back at the bastards who did this to me"); Cylin, then nine, is baffled as she and her two older brothers attract unwelcome attention ("Everyone thinks your dad is going to die," a cousin tells her. "But you're lucky you don't have to go to school") and are later forsaken as classmates' parents deem friendship with them too risky. Where John's chapters provide the grim facts, it is Cylin's authentically childlike perspective that, in revealing the cost to her innocence, renders the tragic experience most searingly. Ages 14-up.
