FAILURE TO PROTECT

Four-year-old Alma Varela has a braid her mother plaits every morning, a wall of drawings, and a gray stuffed rabbit she carries from room to room. DCFS caseworker Nadia Cole has stood in enough homes to know the difference between one in trouble and one being performed. This one is neither. It is just a family. The report is false, and Nadia can prove it.

She proves it too late. A man is already carrying Alma down the stairs, and the rabbit is on the floor where no one thinks to pick it up.

Alma lands in a foster home rated excellent by a private agency that grades its own work. The house is spotless. The nightlight comes off the wall at night. Within weeks, the drawings stop. The talking stops.

Nadia knows what she is looking at. Proving it means breaking every rule she has followed, and exposing the one person the family kept hidden.

To save this child, she will risk another. The reason she cannot let this case go is the one thing she has never told anyone. She was a child in this system once. She left it at eighteen with what fit in a bag, and one thing she reached back for that no one thought to hand her.

A sentence, spoken in a dark room. I want to go home.

The first book in The Horizon Cases, a Nadia Cole thriller, from the author of The Privilege.