Child of Silence
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4.3 • 271 Ratings
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Publisher Description
In the first award-winning Bo Bradley Mystery, Child of Silence, an old Paiute woman finds a four-year-old boy tied to a mattress in an abandoned shack in the hills above San Diego, and child abuse investigator Bo Bradley gets the case. Staff at St. Mary's Hospital for Children assume the boy is mentally impaired because he cannot talk, but Bo remembers a little sister named Laurie. The boy, like Laurie, is deaf.
Complicating things is Bo's manic depressive disorder, a troubling but occasionally valuable problem for which she almost always takes her meds. Bo tangles with the system, first in attempts to place her young client in a foster home where sign language is used, and later, after someone has tried to shoot the child, in a desperate, manicky, midnight flight into the desert to save his life.
"A sensationally fine first novel… breathtakingly well-told…"The Los Angeles Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This powerful and suspenseful debut features an unusual heroine, San Diego Juvenile Court child abuse investigator Bo Bradley. A closet manic-depressive, Bo fights to keep her job and her equilibrium when she is assigned the case of a four-year-old boy found tied to a mattress in an abandoned house on an Indian reservation. She realizes that the boy is deaf, not retarded as she first thought, and hopes to place him with a family who will teach him to sign. But her intuition and her own experience with a deaf sister tells her that the boy had been tied up to prevent him from straying. Could someone have intended to return to him? She finds a grocery receipt, the only clue to the boy's identity. When two men attempt to shoot him and she receives a threatening note, her mission becomes increasingly urgent. Recognizing and resisting the manic phase of her own disorder, she traces the boy's past to Houston and an important political race. Padgett's deft handling of Bo's mental state and her empathetic rendering of his deafness add originality and depth to a gripping story.
Customer Reviews
Enlightening story.
I couldn’t put the book down. The story was beautiful and sad. The characters were fantastic. Great read and highly recommended.
Great Title
Very well written.Held one’s interest throughout. My
Excellent read.
I enjoyed the story line. I really like Bo as a character Couldn’t put the book down.