Product Description

Ashley Pond was only twelve years old when she vanished from a school bus stop in a town south of Portland, Oregon. As a shocked community came together and police began a frantic search, another tragedy was just about to take place. Miranda Gaddis was Ashley's best friend. Just two months after Ashley's disappearance, Miranda was on her way to school when she, too, was abducted. Nobody knew the scandalous, unspeakable secret that the two girls shared ...except for one man, who lived just one block away. The police and FBI managed to overlook the girls' neighbour whose daughter was a friend of Miranda and Ashley's - and who had a catalogue of sexual-assault allegations behind him. Author Linda O'Neal was a private investigator intimately involved in this shocking case. Now, she and her co-authors - also participants in the case - tell the chilling story of one town's devastating loss ...and how the murderer was finally found.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #69138 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 384 pages

Customer Reviews

Disappointed
This book sounded good and even started ok (it was well written if nothing else) but by the time I finished it I found it to be one of the most annoying books I've read.

The book was supposedly written by the 'grandmother' of one of the victims. The link between the victim and the author was so tenuous that to call her the 'grandmother' or 'step-grandmother' was laughable and smacked of someone trying to make money out of a very tragic situation.

The author wasn't really involved in this case (although I think she had convinced herself by the end that she had solved it single-handedly!) but she was a private investigator who did some research into it. This would have been fine and getting a PI view of a case would have given a good angle but it didn't quite work out that way.

The author saw fit to almost skim over details of the crime but to include every mundane, pointless detail of her conversations with her family and friends (yawn). I found myself skipping through the sections of the book that were about her (probably about a third of the book in total).

While this woman obviously cared about the case, she wasn't really anything to do with it. It's very easy to say that you knew who it was after the fact - if she had been so sure and had so much evidence, why didn't anybody listen to her at the time, I wonder (she described a scene where she took all her evidence to the FBI who apparently threw her out before she finished her first sentence)!? And it doesn't seem that she tried very hard - even when leads seemed to 'drop' into her lap, it appeared that she left them for weeks before following them up, if at all.

The most irritating bit of the book was after the murderer was finally apprehended (and only because of another crime he committed). The author's husband said to her (twice!) 'You did it, you got him'. I was wondering if I'd been reading a different book because, as far as I could see, the author had no part in it at all - she merely had some suspicions behind the scenes.

The whole book was very annoying and also did that annoying low-budget thing of printing the photos on cheap paper so they were hard to make out. I wish I'd spent my money on something else because this was a big disappointment.