A Whistleblower's Account -- Into the Wood Chipper - USAID Shredded - Nicholas Enrich AND MORE from Timothy Snyder - News on Ebola Latest Breakout...

 

The update with the author re Ebola latest outbreak is last on this news video...

To the public servants, 

whose compassion, optimism, and devotion lift all of humanity

****

Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. — TIMOTHY SNYDER, On Tyranny

https://timothysnyder.org/resources/ 

 We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience--On Tyranny

Note: I have not yet read this book; however, because of the declared announcement of a major breakout of Ebola, I wanted to spotlight some part of this important book NOW. We have seen just how our medical issues have been totally disregarded by this administration. For instance, the fact that a measles outbreak has been allowed to go untreated is UNBELIEVABLE... We cannot afford to risk our lives since the USAID is no longer working to ensure major medical events are known immediately, broadcasted, and acted upon!

~~~~

Foreword By Atul Gawande (Atul Atmaram Gawande is an American surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.)

As I write this, it is a year after President Donald Trump ordered a ninety-day pause on the United States’ foreign assistance for a reassessment of priorities as one of his first acts in office for his second term. At the time, those words came across to the American public as so bland as to seem almost meaningless. How harmful can a “pause” in anything really be? Reassessment seems like an appropriate thing for a new president to do. And what is meant by foreign assistance, anyway? Within days, however, it became apparent that the order meant the immediate stoppage of the country’s non-military aid abroad of every kind—in particular, the entire work of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) from ending diseases like polio, tuberculosis, and HIV, to assisting with disaster relief in places such as Ukraine and Gaza, to protecting orphans, refugees, and religious minorities in some of the most hellish places on earth. Established in 1961, and championed by President John F. Kennedy, USAID had been created by Congress to provide sustained, expert support for the advancement of human survival, economies, and democracy in order to foster peace and stability and to counter the adversaries of freedom.

It is clear that the United States is now an adversary of freedom...

There is no such thing as a temporary pause in such work. It soon became clear that hundreds of thousands would die. But the new administration only doubled down, turning the pause into a wholesale dismantling of USAID. The toll since has been staggering. Boston University researchers have conservatively estimated that, one year later, the shutdown has already killed at least three-quarters of a million people, most of them children. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has projected the first increase in child deaths since the 1960s. Furthermore, with the entire infrastructure of the agency destroyed—more than ten thousand staff around the world were fired, programs touching hundreds of millions of lives were terminated, and networks and expertise built over six decades were lost—the bleeding is guaranteed to extend far into the future, even if funding and commitment to development assistance are restored. We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made death,” which, he asserted, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century. Into the Wood Chipper is a remarkable, devastating insider account of exactly how this was able to occur. The agency was brought to its knees in a matter of a few weeks, despite being established in law. Nick Enrich was a civil servant at USAID during four administrations, two Democratic and two Republican, and as USAID’s last acting head of global health, he was a witness to the pivotal events. He makes painfully clear that, in order to destroy the agency, people at the highest levels made choices to ignore the law, the procedures, and the harm to people’s lives. Others—in Congress, the courts, and in the agency itself, including Nick—were then confronted with what they would do in the face of those choices. And what you encounter in his account of this tragedy is a Shakespearean range of human behavior and emotion: deceit, indifference to harm, bloodlust, thirst for power, incompetence, fear, accommodation, self-delusion, and, at all too few moments, courage. 

From January 2022 to January 2025, I was USAID’s assistant administrator for global health, a politically appointed and Senate-confirmed role. When I arrived, one of my primary concerns was how to manage bureaucrats. I’d absorbed all the stereotypes: they’d lack work ethic and talent and be impossible to hold accountable. I came to see that none of it was true. Just weeks into my role, Russia launched missile attacks on Kyiv and a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and I got a fast lesson in what USAID personnel were capable of. Among its many catastrophic effects, the war immediately cut off the country’s medical supplies, shuttering pharmacies across Ukraine, and Russian cyberattacks disabled hospitals’ digital systems. Inability to access medications and hospital care endangered vastly more lives than the bombs. For instance, a quarter million Ukrainians with HIV, and even more with diabetes and heart disease, depended on medicines for their lives. While the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance was responsible for supporting the Ukrainian government’s response for the millions of people suddenly displaced from their homes, my Bureau for Global Health was responsible for supporting the health system to remain functioning. First, the foreign service staff in Kyiv focused on getting to safety. But within days of doing that, the health team had reconstituted in new locations, identified the supply chain and cybersecurity expertise they needed, and helped the government develop its strategy for keeping the health system going. Then, over the next several weeks, they helped the country execute, shifting hospital management systems to a new cloud-based system that was better protected against cyberattacks, working with the World Health Organization and numerous others to establish a new supply chain for medical supplies integrating more than five thousand humanitarian relief organizations, as well as getting six months of HIV medications mobilized for delivery. Within weeks, half the pharmacies in the country were supplied and open. Within three months, more than 80 percent were. The personnel in D.C. and Eastern Europe had worked around the clock. They solved problems of every dimension. They followed the law. And they delivered at a scale and with an impact like I’d never experienced. During my time in office, that would prove to be my experience again and again. Nick Enrich was a prime example of USAID’s personnel. I’d recruited him from another bureau to serve, essentially, as the chief financial officer for our bureau, overseeing our processes for budgeting, planning, and program execution. This was a hot seat role. We ran a major international operation involving thousands of partner organizations and government entities in more than sixty-five countries. We dealt with problems that sometimes required planning in hours and delivering in days, but other times—when, say, working to strengthen outbreak surveillance systems around the world or to reduce global child deaths—required planning in months and delivering in years. We were constantly being called to account for our spending and outcomes by our congressional oversight committees. On the one hand, USAID delivered arguably the highest impact per dollar of any agency in the U.S. government, saving lives by the millions with a global health budget in 2024 of just twenty-four dollars per American (out of fifteen thousand dollars per person paid in taxes). On the other hand, there were legitimate criticisms. The agency could be inefficient. It could foster dependency. Too much of its funding went to international institutions, rather than to local ones. I set improvement targets for each of these issues that I promised Congress we’d hit, and Nick was responsible for big parts of delivering on them. And deliver he did. The Nick Enrich you encounter in these pages is the same Nick Enrich I knew from working together: a perceptive observer, a man with capacity to keep cool and perform under enormous pressure, and a patriot of the old-fashioned kind, motivated simply by the opportunity to serve and save lives. In his book, he writes the way he speaks and thinks—clearly, honestly, without euphemism or bureaucratese. He does not omit the details, including about his own regrets. This requires fearlessness. When Trump’s appointees arrived at USAID shortly after the inauguration—swinging their chainsaws, clueless about the agency’s lifesaving work, and not actually interested in it—Nick was only at the midpoint of his career. He has still-young children at home and a mortgage to pay. He has no clear job ahead for his future. I have spoken to many former USAID staff who, to this day, will not speak publicly about what they saw and experienced, out of understandable fear of retaliation or being blacklisted from the few remaining jobs in their decimated field. But not Nick. He blew the whistle as USAID was being dismantled and officially documented the inhumanity and illegality of the administration’s actions. He filed an affidavit that was cited by the Supreme Court. And now his book exposes the people responsible and precisely how they precipitated public man-made death. He deserves our country’s gratitude.

!!!!!!!!

Author’s Note Conversations recounted in this book are drawn from contemporaneous notes and my best recollection of events. I have reproduced them as accurately as memory and verification allow. Quoted emails, directives, and other written communications come directly from original documents I retained. A collection of key documents is available at www.intothewoodchipper.com. I have not changed names or concealed identities, with the sole exception of a personal friend whose identity has no bearing on these events. I have excluded anything for which I lacked records or reliable notes. There was far more I witnessed and could have documented. However, my access to USAID email and file systems was abruptly cut off in March 2025, limiting what I could corroborate. What follows is based exclusively on the evidence I was able to preserve. The rest will have to be told by others who had more time or foresight to retain records, or otherwise will wait until the government releases a full set. The more than ten thousand people working at USAID on January 20, 2025 were employed through a wide array of hiring mechanisms: civil service, foreign service, foreign service nationals, institutional support contractors, personal service contractors, fellows, detailees, and others. I often refer to these groups collectively—career officials, civil servants, staff members—to distinguish them from political appointees and DOGE. Although we served side by side in pursuit of USAID’s mission, these employment categories carried real and sometimes painful differences. For example, when institutional support contractors were terminated in January, their pay and benefits ended immediately. Many exhausted unemployment benefits within weeks. By contrast, civil service officers like myself remained on paid administrative leave and later collected severance for months. These disparities shaped our individual experiences, though they represent just one dimension of the human consequences of the events described in this book.

*

Prologue - It was a cold Thursday evening in February 2025, exactly one month into the Trump administration. It already felt like it had been years. I was sitting in the loud, dingy basement of Astro Beer Hall in downtown Washington with three of my colleagues from the U.S. Agency for International Development. We had claimed a small table in the corner of the bar, squeezed between a birthday party and a corporate happy hour. It had been another wretched day, and I didn’t know how much longer we could keep this up. Our agency was facing an extinction event. The meteor had already hit, and USAID, which for more than sixty years had saved millions of lives around the world from disease and poverty, had been left smoldering in ruins. It had started on Inauguration Day, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order pausing all foreign assistance. Things had unraveled from there. Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and social media tycoon, had set out to destroy the agency, having seized on USAID as a test case to demonstrate the power of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, his new quasi-governmental creation. He didn’t know what USAID did, or why it existed in the first place, and he didn’t seem to care. All he knew was that he intended to feed USAID, in his words, “into the wood chipper.” Musk’s operatives had put the agency’s leadership on administrative leave and had summarily fired thousands of international development experts in Washington and across the globe. In a half-hearted effort to stave off a humanitarian catastrophe, the new U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, issued a waiver that supposedly allowed USAID to resume its lifesaving work. But Trump’s appointees and Musk’s DOGE team ignored the waiver. 

Even as the administration publicly claimed that lifesaving programs were continuing, behind closed doors they forged ahead on their single-minded mission to destroy USAID. Funding was frozen. The workforce was slashed. Systems crumbled. Contracts were terminated. They even removed USAID’s name from the entrance to its headquarters in the Ronald Reagan federal office building on Pennsylvania Avenue. The results were rapid, predictable, and catastrophic. In Zambia, pregnant women with HIV could no longer find medicine to prevent their babies from being infected. In Sierra Leone, crates of donated drugs sat expiring on warehouse shelves instead of saving children’s lives. In war-torn Sudan, malnourished families walked all day to communal kitchens, only to find them closed. During this whirlwind of destruction, I had been promoted, without warning, to the top position in USAID’s Bureau for Global Health, where I was ordered to endorse the termination of these programs and the firing of hundreds of my colleagues. This was not what I had signed up for. 

My distress had intensified as I watched Musk flagrantly lie. Standing next to Trump in the Oval Office, he assured the gathered journalists and their live TV audiences that USAID’s programs to prevent the spread of deadly diseases like Ebola and HIV were still operating. They weren’t. DOGE was dismantling them piece by piece. At the same time, Secretary Rubio and his team were blaming me and my colleagues for the undeniable and deadly mess, accusing us of intentionally creating bureaucratic hurdles to block delivery of food and medicine. Rubio called USAID’s career staff “completely uncooperative” and “insubordinate,” even as his own political team stonewalled our desperate efforts to restart lifesaving aid. Trump then piled on, claiming that USAID was run by “radical lunatics” and pushing absurd lies about our work. By late February, all hope of preserving even a fraction of USAID’s work seemed lost. 

The Bureau for Global Health, originally nearly eight hundred people strong, was on the verge of being reduced to a staff measured in two digits, and none of our programs were operative. And so on this Thursday evening I found myself at Astro Beer Hall with Ramona Godbole, Nida Parks, and Natalia Machuca, three of my senior colleagues, who had been on the front lines with me for the past weeks, as we tried—over and over—to blunt the effects of the staff cuts, funding freezes, and contract terminations. I was exhausted, running on fumes. I had slept no more than an hour the previous night. My team and I had been up late working yet another unsolvable problem the agency’s political leaders had manufactured for us. It was just the latest in a month of self-inflicted chaos that comes along with political appointees who have no understanding of or interest in learning the rules or laws of government. We were trying to respond to a deadly Ebola outbreak in Uganda, had been trying for weeks. But we had been stymied at every turn. The night before, USAID’s leaders finally agreed to our plan to send twenty-seven thousand sets of personal protective equipment into the outbreak zone—except there was a catch. They wouldn’t authorize payment to release the PPE from the Kenyan warehouse where it was being stored. Instead, they had ordered me to go get the supplies myself. I had tried to explain that was not how we operate. Even if I could get there, and had a license to drive a truck, I was not authorized to transport the PPE across the Ugandan border. Besides, sending me to do all this would cost more than the nominal transfer fee (we had already paid for the PPE, we just needed to move it). This was why USAID contracts for this type of service, I explained. But my new bosses were not convinced. They insisted that I go pick it up and make the delivery. Oh, and one more thing: They gave me twelve hours to get it done. That order had come just before 8 p.m., and my team and I had been flailing to find some way to move the supplies ever since. The twelve-hour deadline had come and gone, and I hadn’t been fired yet, at least as far as I knew. More important, we were no closer to providing the needed PPE to respond to the Ebola outbreak. I can’t take much more of this, I thought. Ramona must have been able to read it on my face, and she was at least as fed up as I was. “We have to get the fuck out!” she blurted, taking a swig from her wineglass. Normally soft-spoken and careful with her words, Ramona had reached her breaking point. I knew she was right, but it was hard to hear. Resigning from our jobs would mean giving up on everything: our careers, our mission, the lives that depended on our work. 

This was not the first time Ramona had argued that this was our only option; she had drafted a resignation letter two weeks earlier, and I had nearly signed on to it several times. Each time, I had wavered, thinking that we could do more good if we stayed in our jobs and fought the administration’s onslaught from the inside. Nida had always argued against Ramona’s drastic remedy. Once again she made her case. “We cannot quit yet,” she said. “Not while there’s still a sliver of hope we can restart something. I know we’re driving ourselves insane and making zero progress, but as long as there is anything left we can do, we have to keep trying.” “But what are we actually doing?” asked Natalia. “Can you name one thing we’ve done since this administration came in that you’re proud of? Because I can’t.” I tried to think of an answer, but nothing came. That was a bad sign. I had worked at USAID for more than twelve years, and it was rare to go even a day without feeling proud of what I was doing. I was now the agency’s top global health official, but my dream job had turned into a nightmare. Day by day, at the direction of our reckless and vindictive political leadership, we were abandoning our lifesaving programs and the people who relied on them, disbanding our staff, shredding our agency from within. We were digging graves—our own, and those for millions of others. 

I drained my beer and headed to the bar for another round. Three more pilsners and another glass of the happy hour red. Threading my way back through the crowd with the four precariously balanced drinks, I took stock of our situation. I was coming around to Ramona’s point of view. Back at the table, I slid the drinks to my colleagues, wondering how we—just four civil servants—could find a way to get the truth out, in the face of lies from the world’s richest man and from the highest-ranking officials in the Trump administration. Ramona, Nida, and Natalia had been huddled together conspiratorially while I competed for the bartender’s attention. Now they went silent as I returned. All eyes were on me. Even in the bar’s dim light, I noticed Ramona’s sly smile. “We don’t have to go down quietly,” she said. “We could blaze out.” Natalia nodded in agreement. Ramona went on: “Nick, you’re the highest-ranking global health official at USAID. If you tell the world what they’ve done—how many lives it’ll cost, how it’ll make the U.S. more vulnerable to the next pandemic—people will listen. Maybe Congress would even act.” The idea was intoxicating. I didn’t want the political appointees at USAID to get away with the cruelty they’d shown as they tore down decades of progress in global health. I wanted to expose their indifference and ignorance, which was already costing lives, and it was going to get so much worse. “Would anyone even believe me?” I asked. “If we do it right, they’d have to,” Natalia jumped in. “We’ve got the records. Every email, every document, all the notes. What if we wrote it up? Every illegal order, every time they stopped us from saving lives, every time we warned them and they shrugged us off. I’d love to write one last great memo.” Left unsaid was the obvious next step: That memo and evidence would have to be leaked far and wide. My colleagues were serious, and now I was intrigued. At what point was it time to take a stand? When would it be too late to speak up? “What do you think, Nida?” I asked. She was the least ready to give up the fight, and she had talked me off the ledge a few times already when I had been prepared to quit. But Ramona and Natalia were not proposing surrender. Far from it. “Do you think we should blaze out, too?” She hesitated. “We’re definitely running out of other options,” she said finally. 

“At least it would be a warning for other agencies, the ones they’ll come for next.”

Nida was right. This wasn’t just about USAID. We were the first victim of DOGE’s chainsaw, but we certainly would not be the last. The staff at whichever agency was fed through the wood chipper next—the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the Department of Education—could learn from what had happened to us at USAID and avoid some of our mistakes. The alternative looked untenable. If we kept our heads down, quietly carrying out the administration’s dangerous and unethical orders, weren’t we just helping them expand their assault to other federal programs? If we didn’t speak up, who would? I looked around the table: Together the four of us had spent fifty-five years at USAID. What would it mean to walk away from that? Where would we go from here? In the dark corner of the bar, I tried to grasp how much ground had been lost. In a single month, I had gone from being a stalwart civil servant, dutifully carrying out the president’s foreign assistance agenda, to a potential whistleblower, ready to expose the administration’s lies, its cruelty, and the danger its actions posed to U.S. national security. I thought of all my colleagues at USAID. As the walls closed in, they, too, faced terrible choices. Now the choice was mine.

~~~~

Note: Italics show my points of anger!

Plan to Vote No Matter How, No Matter when, No Matter who Tries to 

Stop US

Gabby

Philllipa Nefri Clark Presents The Cottage at Whisper Lake - Temple River - Caring for Elderly Spotlight!

 When Dad told us we were moving, I made him promise we could bring everything of Mum’s as well. Nothing was to be thrown or given away. I’d carefully packed Mum’s clothes and shoes and locked diaries and photographs into especially sturdy boxes. And made a nest in the middle of Mum’s softest jumper for the jewellery box. I do love the small box with its lavender pattern with gold metal around the edges and when it is opened, a darling little ballerina lifts up and slowly spins in a perpetual pirouette as music plays. As long as I wind it up first with the key on the back, the dancer always dances. 

One day, maybe, I could be a dancer. 

Why wouldn’t a person care about the wellbeing of their neighbour? Mind you, her father never had. He rarely had a nice word to say about anyone unless it was to the face of a guest. But she couldn’t blame one man for her narrow view of the world. She worked with men a lot and some of them were decent blokes. Some of them.

‘See. It is a lake. A magic lake which makes people laugh,’ he says. ‘And when we sit in our magic lake we can whisper secrets to each other. Whimsical whispering water. With fish.’

This is such a lovely story... Even though the way it was written, readers will also experience the sadness that comes from the story. The story begins in the past where a family has just experienced the death of the mother. It saddens them all... But, the father decides to relocate to another town where his soon can attend a special school for detailed medical help. Charlie is looking forward to attending school. His sister, not so much. Mainly she doesn['t want to leave the place where her mother is buried--and she won't be able to visit like she has been doing.

Rebecca--Becky--is a good student, but she has taken on most of the duties needed to keep the home running. There is a constant discussion which sometimes includes her Dad's sister, about her needing to also attend a special school for girls, which her aunt happens to run. Rebecca was opposed to leaving her father and brother... Readers are privy to the day that everything changes. It was the end of an era of family happiness that had just begun as Charlie was growing stronger at his new school...

Readers travel over 60 years ago where we meet an entirely new family. One that has been separated due to trouble that developed fairly early in their marriage. We meet Sadie who has become a journalist who became a specialist in creating documentaries. She has developed a good reputation and has been kept busy in production of one after the other. So much so that she hasn't been home for years.

Her father has died so that Pam, her mother was now the only family connection and had been left after her father's death to run the family Inn. However, when Sadie got there, she immediately noticed that there was a change not only in the condition of the Inn but in the physical health of her mother. Readers can't help but become emotionally involved as these two women struggle to develop a new relationship that was based on their own connection as opposed to having their father being a wedge between them.

It's a sad story that will evolve as Sadie is there to not only see her mother, but to deal with the family will, the future, and what will happen in the future. Sadie finds herself stuck dealing with the past--a time when, when young, she and her father were very close and he was very supportive of her becoming what Sadie wanted to do in the future. But at some point, she remembered two men from a local church had come to speak to her father. And suddenly her father pulled away from the daughter he had spent so much time and support to her when she was younger.

Although Pam had loved her husband, she also had to adapt to the change that came over her husband... But Sadie soon realized that Pam was a stronger women than she had thought and, together, they worked to plan where they both would be in their future. With a little bit of help from her mother, Sadie also met Dan, a local building contractor, with whom she'd been talking about doing work in the Inn itself. Of course, Sadie and Dan were "destined" to be attracted to each other, even though Sadie was a lot harder to convince of being able to trust Dan...

I’m a big believer in the shrine of a trillion stars in the midnight sky.’ Good grief, if you don’t stop saying everything right and looking so darned gorgeous I am going to fall for you. Stop it.

But it wasn't until Sadie had become to explore the area and came across the home of somebody that put her on alert, that she and Dan got to know each other... Sadie had taken a walk and came upon a small cabin, where a black cat came happily to greet her, and quickly heading into the house... Sadie noticed that the door was open and, worried, she step in and immediately noticed a purse opened on a nearby table... Soon, the entire town was alerted. Rebecca a woman in her 70s had previously gone off by herself and had needed help to return home. Pam hooked Sadie up with Dan who was a friend who had helped before and had become friends with Rebecca...

It was Dan and Sadie who found Rebecca and got her home, but it was Sadie who took more of an interest--Many of the documentaries Sadie had made were dealing with homelessness and aging... But that first day, Rebecca had asked Sadie to help her find them and Sadie had said she would try, but, later, Rebecca didn't remember that request... But Sadie did and kept on trying to discover who or what she was looking for...

But there were many times available for picnics, or exploring Dan's home which he'd built himself... And, of course, Sadie was excited to see they had similar tastes in the home environment...

Folks, I chose to close out this review with a surprise which related to how the ending will surprise you in a delightful way... Sadie is working on a documentary of a new facility in this lake area...and it's bound to have lots of exciting music to celebrate... So enjoy!

May music and happiness end each day as you spend time with all those who care for each other and work together to service and support all God's Children! And, I highly recommend you don't miss this book!

GABixlerReviews

Now Reading: This is What America Looks Like - My Journey From Refugee to Congresswoman - Excerpt!

 As a refugee who fled civil war as a child, I am still trying to figure out where I fit in—which is perhaps why the most important note I found sticking to the wall outside my office had only three words. 

“You belong here.”

Even though there are many politicians who interest me, this one woman, who happened to write a book, has drawn me since she was first taunted over and over and over by white congressmen.

What power did she have to achieve so soon a prejudicial spirit from the republican party? For surely she had no past experience that they could consider--at least I didn't think so. Yet, there she was being a target right from the point she had been elected...

Why?

Obviously I decided to buy her memoir.

But immediately I realized that this book may later be a political story. But first, we learned about her early life that was so completely different from those who grew up in America, that I was startled...

And then empathy flowed as I continued to read...

Perhaps, I thought, if I shared an early chapter, there would be many United States women, and perhaps, even some men, who would also find, if not empathy, at least some type of sympathy???

But, frankly, after the last decade and, especially, during the last several years, I have lost any trust that men who have been so indoctrinated by various groups, that, if we allow it, women will be "placed" back into the kitchen/house, never to be allowed to even leave that building...

Am I wrong? I hope so. There are many women who have known the lack of a love such as Jesus (And who was clearly NOT White)

taught--to love wives as Christ loved the Church... I recognize that my faith is falling--not in God--but in how those who claim to be Christian have turned against the majority of All God's Children!

Because they are not White

But, merely, like Jesus and many other leaders

The Irony of this turn for so many is sadly incomprehensible to most... 

Prologue “Thank you for helping to uplift so many girls from all over! Love from Seattle.” “Salaam sister—from the West Side in Senegal to Detroit #13 strong. You continue to amplify us.” I don’t remember when they first appeared on the wall outside my office in the Capitol Building: the Post-it notes with words of admiration and encouragement left by people from as far as Duluth and Delhi. “Congresswoman, traveled from Oregon and HAD to see you! Thank you for being BRAVE, BOLD, AND OUTSPOKEN. If UR ever in Eugene, I can show you around.” “Thank you so much for all you’re doing to protect our courts!” “Keep fighting for immigrants.” I do know when they started to become a problem for Facilities. It was a few months after I became the first Somali American Muslim woman elected to Congress in 2018—right after President Donald Trump began his Twitter attacks against me. “Ilhan is an American hero!” “No matter what they say, we’ll always have your back!” Overnight, a large mosaic of multicolored squares grew up around the American flag and plaque bearing my name and the name of the state I represent, Minnesota. Maintenance asked us to remove them, so my staff took the Post-its down and put them back up on a wall inside my office. But visitors to the congressional office building, open to the public Monday to Friday, 7:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M., continued to put them up. “Thank you so much for being a voice for those who cannot speak for themselves.” “You are a soldier of the people for peace & justice for all.” They just kept coming, so Facilities gave up. Now the patch of little neon notes is a permanent bright spot on the otherwise austere white walls of a municipal hallway. What I am most proud of is not the visible expression of support for my work as a legislator, fighting for all my constituents’ ability to participate in our democracy. Nor is it the high praise or the depth of emotion—although these sentiments have gotten me through some tough times. What I am most moved by is the incredible diversity of the message writers. They come from different places and perspectives. There are Post-its from teenage girls, who dot their exclamation marks with little hearts, and from Senate staffers, who took a moment from their long days in a cynical city to jot down a positive word. A blue heart-shaped sticky note with “Republican women support you” was stuck beside a regular yellow Post-it that read, “From one black immigrant to another, please know that I love you.” I learned the Hebrew letters on a light blue note, מיר וועלן זיי עיבערלעבן, were actually Yiddish for “We will outlive them,” which Hasidic Jews in 1939 had turned into a song of resistance in the face of a Nazi commander. That all these people and more would choose to stand behind me—a Muslim immigrant who had arrived in this country from Africa speaking only two words of English—is proof enough that there are stronger bonds than identity. As a refugee who fled civil war as a child, I am still trying to figure out where I fit in—which is perhaps why the most important note I found sticking to the wall outside my office had only three words. “You belong here.”

Named a Best Political Book of the Year by The Atlantic

“This Is What America Looks Like is the origin story of a leader who,

 finding no set path that would take a person like her to the

places she wanted to go, was forced, and free, to chart her own.” 

–The New York Times Book Review

1 Fighter 1982–1988

Mogadishu, Somalia The teacher quickly put a student in charge of my third-grade class before she stepped out of the room. This was not unusual in my elementary school, where students stayed in the same classroom while our teachers for different subjects rotated in and out. When transitioning between periods, teachers usually designated one child to keep the rest from getting too rowdy. Like all kids, we were prone to abusing this position. Today, though, the boy in charge really let his newfound power go to his head. Almost immediately, he ordered another, smaller boy up to the chalkboard to write an assignment. “I beg you,” said the boy being ordered to the board, “leave me alone.” But the tall boy in charge was determined to humiliate his classmate, who was a minority in every sense. Poor, small, and an orphan, he didn’t have the crisp white shirts, ironed uniform trousers, and shiny school shoes of the middle class that the large boy and I both came from. The big boy continued to taunt his victim, escalating his threats when his classmate wouldn’t rise from his seat, until finally he shouted, “Hooyadawus!” which means “Go fuck your mother” in Somali. I burned in my seat. I always hate it when people use vulgar language, but I get really angry when it involves mothers, who I knew from the beginning were sacred—even if I didn’t have one. I mean, everybody was always talking about how important mothers are. In Islam, my native country’s main religion, we learned that “Paradise is under the feet of mothers.” You were supposed to bow to your mother, abide by her every wish, not debase her. There were also deeper forces at play than my seven-year-old brain could recognize in the moment. Although thanks to my older sisters and many loving aunties I didn’t lack for mothering, my mother, my hooyo, had died when I was a preschooler. I don’t have a single memory of her, even though I remember other things from that age—like family members fighting over whether or not I should start school. Some of my aunties and uncles thought I was too young, because technically you were supposed to wait at least until you lost your first two teeth. “She’ll lose her books,” someone said. “She won’t know where to go,” another argued, “and the other kids will steal from her.” But I didn’t stop complaining until they let me go. And, no, I didn’t lose my books or get robbed, even with all my baby teeth intact. I remember all of that clearly, but my hooyo? What she looked like, something she said, even what she died of? Nothing. As an adult, I went to a hypnotist to see if he could help evoke something, anything—a voice, a touch—but nothing emerged. I still find it so odd. Whether it was an early commitment to my religion’s teachings or the fact that an absence can loom larger than any reality, mothers were a big deal to me—and I didn’t like anybody to disrespect them. “He’s not going to get up,” I said to the bully. “You’re supposed to make sure nobody gets out of their seat, not give us assignments. So you’re just going to sit and shut up, and we’re going to wait for Teacher.” The boy, at least two heads taller than me, was not impressed. “If you don’t shut up, you’ll be sorry,” he said menacingly. I was a particularly tiny child, so anyone who didn’t know me assumed I was a coward. The runt who always got bullied at school. But I wasn’t afraid of fighting. I felt like I was bigger and stronger than everyone else—even if I knew that wasn’t really the case. “I’ll meet you in the rear courtyard after school,” I said. That was the place where all the kids went to fight. Right before the next teacher entered the room, the boy who I had stood up for whispered to me, “After school, I’m going to run, because after they beat you, they’re going to beat me.” “If you don’t want them messing with you every day,” I replied, “you’ve got to stand up for yourself.” He might have been a wimp, but he was no liar. When school let out, he kept his word and ran. With a crowd of kids screaming around us, the bully and I began fighting. I was small but a good fighter. I pulled the boy down and rubbed his face in the sand. When my brother, Malaaq, who was in the eighth grade, arrived to watch the fight and saw me grinding the boy into the ground, he shouted, “Ilhan! What the hell?” My brother wasn’t actually surprised to see me at the center of a fight, just annoyed. There was always a slew of parents coming to our house to complain that I had hurt their children. My dad would just laugh. “The only child nobody should be coming here to complain about is my smallest baby.” YES, I WAS THE BABY OF A LARGE FAMILY, AND YES, I WAS SMALL. But that had nothing to do with the sticks growing in the bushes by the gate outside our house, which were perfect for beating back any kid who chased me home from school. I had the independent mindset of an only child. I didn’t feel young, in no small part because I was never treated like a child. No one was patronized in my brilliant, loud family. In our Mogadishu compound—filled with African art, books of history and Somali poetry, and music—the disagreements were constant. We were a multigenerational family—aunties, uncles, cousins, and siblings from my maternal side, all living together. We were unlike a traditional hierarchical Somali family, where when the father or mother spoke no one else dared utter a word. Instead, everyone, even the youngest child, me, was brought into every decision. Sometimes I wished Baba, my grandfather, and my aabe, my father, would take on more authoritarian roles. They were annoyingly accommodating to each person’s opinion and patient during the ensuing arguments. Everybody was always screaming about what we should do, even when it came to what we were going to eat for dinner. The constant conflict made us at once close and distant from one another. Despite our differing points of view, we all were accustomed to disputes—we had that in common. There was nothing typical about my family. To this day, I don’t know a family quite like ours. But in Somalia, where members of an extended family living together are almost always patrilineal, we especially stood out, since my aabe had moved in with my mother and her family after they were married. Sons usually assumed responsibility for supporting their parents as they aged. Hooyo, however, wouldn’t agree to marry Aabe unless she could stay with her family. My father didn’t have a full appreciation of what he was getting into when he decided to leave everything he knew by the wayside for love. Although I would perceive different conflicts in him when I grew older, as a child, the greatest one I noticed had to do with his diet. Aabe, who won’t touch seafood, married into a family where fish was the primary source of protein. Furthermore, although he ostensibly fit into my mother’s world, as is often the case, he could never completely forget the ways he was born into. My father, an educator, came from a traditional patriarchal Somali family where the boys, the primary beneficiaries of educational investment, were raised to become the leaders of their future families. Meanwhile, when my grandfather welcomed his firstborn child, my mother, he promised himself that she would be treated the same as, if not better than, any male firstborn. Custom dictated that only the birth of a boy was a moment for pride. But Baba, who had a huge presence, was nevertheless very proud. He was opinionated and sure of himself, but not without reason. He had one of the sharpest memories of anyone I ever met. Well-read, he had the knowledge of so many books at his fingertips. When he wasn’t working at his government job, helping to run the country’s network of lighthouses, he liked to fish and play cards. Baba was also a great cook. He was a purist when it came to the ingredients he used to prepare dishes of his specialty, Italian cuisine. His minestrone was my favorite food. Just as he wouldn’t compromise on the quality of the tomatoes in his soup, Baba didn’t waver in his convictions. He stayed true to his vow to raise his daughter as an equal to his sons. When Hooyo met Aabe, she was in her twenties, which was very rare at the time, since women predominantly married in their late teens. Not only that, but she was also gainfully employed as a secretary for a government minister. I don’t know that my grandfather needed her financial support, but my mother had a sense of duty about living up to the responsibility and unusual privileges she had been afforded by her father. Everyone knew that if you ever needed Baba to sign on to something or calm him down about a dispute, you needed to talk to his daughter. She was my grandfather’s true confidante. I wasn’t surprised by the stories I heard time and again about how while she was alive, whatever Hooyo said, went. That’s because Baba continued to invest a lot of time and energy in the girls of the family (more than he did with the boys, according to my uncles). He was extremely close to us and did not adopt the traditional patriarchal role of the protector that Somali men usually fall into with the opposite sex. He treated us as equals. It’s always hard to say why a person goes against cultural norms. My grandfather’s freethinking partly stemmed, perhaps, from the fact that he didn’t come from one of the country’s formalized clans. The maternal side of my family was Benadiri, a Somali ethnic minority who trace their lineage to Persians, Indians, and Bantu peoples from West Africa and Arab Yemenis. Successful traders credited with helping spread Islam to Somalia, they settled in port cities like the country’s capital Mogadishu, where my grandfather was born and raised. I think Baba embraced the idea that if you don’t fit in anyway, you might as well do what you want. THE ONLY PLACE WHERE I COMPLETELY FIT IN AS A CHILD WAS within the walls of my family’s compound. Otherwise, I wasn’t quite enough of any one thing. Although officially I belonged to my aabe’s clan—one of the most powerful in the country—I wasn’t fully Somali because of who my mother was. Not that anyone, other than our neighbors, really was aware of this, since we weren’t stereotypical Benadiri, known for their light skin and passive natures. Many of my aunties and uncles, as well as my grandfather, had darker skin like me. And no one in our family was remotely passive. As the youngest, I was spoiled, but then again I really wasn’t. Our family of civil servants and teachers was well off enough to have a guarded compound and driver. But I didn’t like the attention I received from the other kids for the in-your-face privilege of our white Toyota Corolla and our driver, Farah—nor the constraints. I hated being driven back home after school and usually tried to walk, which meant trouble for Aabe, since that’s when the fights with other children took place. I also wasn’t enough of a girl, at least in the traditional sense. None of the women in my family were expected to cook and clean—like most Somali women. We certainly had just as many, if not more, opinions than the men in the house. But I also did what boys did outside the house. I played soccer. I climbed trees. I snuck into the movie theater. No other girls I knew did any of that. My tomboy ways only fueled the talk among the neighborhood women about “poor Ilhan,” a girl growing up without a mother. Never mind that I had all the love and attention of a crowd of caring adults, they reasoned, I must have been deprived of a mother’s affection and guidance. There were so many assumptions about who and what I was supposed to be, and none of them fit the description I had of myself. But I wasn’t burdened by the discrepancy. Indeed, I never bothered to answer for it. Instead, I followed Baba’s example. If there wasn’t a world out there to fully embrace me for who I was, I didn’t have to worry about appeasing anyone.

I was eight years old when civil war broke out in Somalia. One day everything was okay, and the next, there were bullets piercing not only buildings but also people.

In the reality of war, sometimes running for shelter somewhere else makes you feel safer—even if it isn’t so. On the way to my great-grandmother’s home, I saw bodies piled up on the street. We stepped over them. The adults didn’t know what was happening, even though I felt they should. Instead, I kept hearing them say the same thing over and over: “I don’t understand how everything just turned.”

~~~~

My background is German on both sides of my family. Reminding me again that when I asked my mother about my background, she immediately pointed out that I was an American. Today, as we are faced with the extreme turn of one political party against the known principles of democracy, we are also in a position wondering how everything just turned... But, when you stop and think about your own life, you will soon realize that in every society, every culture, there are individuals who act as bullies from their early lives and sometimes carry those predatory emotions into their adult lives. Others will choose, as Ilhan might have, coming from an actual democratically run home with sufficient financial support to be able to strive for what each would choose for their lives...

But as in the Prologue, we see that even with a unique family dynamic, this congresswomen chose to work with others to attempt to make life better for all... She was where she needed to be...

Yet, right from the beginning, it was the president himself who set the tone of prejudice against her, so that many have followed in his footsteps on bigotry... Yet she continues to fight!

What Ilhan Omar symbolized when she was attacked — and why it drives Trump crazy

The administration’s policies are about making women compliant again.

https://www.ms.now/opinion/ilhan-omar-assault-trump-american-women-femininity

Rep. Ilhan Omar: Trump is weaponizing fear against me and other immigrants

ICE activity in Minnesota is state-sanctioned racial profiling used as a tool of political intimidation.

https://www.ms.now/opinion/ilhan-omar-trump-slurs-somali-minnesota-ice

Trump not only dismissed Ilhan Omar — he disrespected his own role as president

Abraham Lincoln warned us about this momen

https://www.ms.now/opinion/ilhan-omar-attack-trump-response

Disclaimer

I am sure all of my readers are aware that I do not support, in any way, the republican party. 

For one reason. We all know that the president lies, and the party follows what he says. I really have no choice. As long as I cannot trust anything stated by the republican representatives, I cannot in good conscience use any "alternative facts" from that group.

I have no desire to debate between parties. Politics, in my opinion, is backing 99% of the actions now being made by our government. None of it is legal. None of it is in in support of the majority of the needs of our citizens. None of it is supported by the constitution.

GABixlerReviews

Favorite Author, Lauren Carr, Presents Her Latest - Shadows of the Missing - A Chris Matheson Cold Case Book 5 - A Personal Favorite! With Playlist...

With a heavy sigh, she collapsed into his arms. “What if she pushes one button too many and I end up killing her?” “You can call Elliott and me, and we’ll help you get rid of her body.” She chuckled. “You’d do that for me?” “I vowed for better or for worse.”

Kassie gave a short, humorless laugh. “Always the cop, huh? Even when it’s family.” “Especially when it’s family.” Helen finally met her gaze. “I spent over thirty years wondering why people disappeared on us. I’m not losing you to something stupid like this.”

“How many pitchers of beer did you drink?” Elliott asked with a wicked grin. “Three,” Chris asked. “But Helen and I weren’t driving and—” “But buzzed enough to kill all inhibitions,” Francine giggled. “Let’s just say while this hotel is nice, the walls aren’t that thick,” Elliott said. “I’m in the mood for love,” Doris sang. Helen’s face flushed. “We are married.” Doris held up her hands in surrender. “Hey, I’m glad that you and my son have a sexually happy relationship.” With a sigh, Chris rubbed his flushed face. “Not for the rest of our stay here.”

It's been quite some time since I read a book by Lauren, but I knew that there would be a basic sameness that made me make her one of my favorite authors... First, a dog will always be a member of the family... Indeed, Lauren started out with a family series and has continued the saga down through the years, spotlighting each generation in one way or another... In my mind I might not be able to remember the ancestral lines, but I can still picture the first main character and how he came to be a rich cop! LOL

And, you will always feel like you're in the midst of a family event... Even with the latest, which includes the Geezer book club (the club is a cover for solving mysteries) there is a feeling of kinship, of laughter, of warmth and sharing that also comes along with backgrounds of individuals which makes the pain and hurt even more poignant to read about... If you're looking for a long-time series or a quick read, do check Lauren Carr out, by entering her name in the right column and pulling up book after book that has brought pleasure to thousands if not millions!

“I’ve made absolutely no headway,” Doris told Helen as she took a seat across from her. “But I’m going to crack this case. All the book club has to do is identify her, then we can find out who killed her and stuffed her in a barrel.” A group of retired law enforcement investigators, the Geezer Squad pretended to be a book club—because they were afraid of what their families would do if they knew that instead of reading crime fiction, their parents and grandparents investigated true crime. Their latest case was The Lady in the Barrel. “Mom is obsessed.” Chris refilled his glass of lemonade and joined them at the kitchen table. “Aren’t you going to take a shower?” Doris asked. “You’re sweaty.” “I’ll take a shower before dinner. I just want to rest for a few minutes.” He reached across the table and slid his mother’s copy of the folder containing the details of that month’s cold case. 

“Can you imagine contracting to have your deck rebuilt and finding a dead body encased in a barrel that has been there for decades?” “How do you not notice a fifty-five-gallon barrel under your deck?” Helen picked up the copy of the forensics report of the barrel’s contents. “Do you know what’s under our porch?” Doris asked with a wicked grin. “Our house is a hundred years old. There’s no telling what secrets the Matheson family has hidden inside these walls or under our floors.” “The key is the barrel.” Chris pointed a finger at the picture of the rusty barrel on the report Helen was scanning. “How many people have fifty-five-gallon barrels lying around? It isn’t something you just pick up at the local hardware store. If we contact the company that made the barrel, they may steer us toward the killer.” “That combined with the used motor oil they found inside with the lady,” Helen said, “That’s a lot of used motor oil. We’re talking about a service garage.” “So, the killer has to have some connection to automotive.” Chris picked up the picture of the composite sketch of the Lady. “What details has the forensic pathologist given us to narrow down our search of the missing persons database?” “He believes she was in her late twenties to early thirties,” Doris said. “Female. She had long blond hair. She was a bleached blonde. Five feet four inches tall. Weighed approximately one hundred and fifteen pounds. She had given birth at some point.” The three of them passed around the picture of a young woman with long blond hair. She was a pretty woman. “What was the cause of death?” Helen asked. “I doubt if she crawled into that barrel to die of natural causes.” “The investigators said she died of asphyxiation,” Doris said. “She’d been strangled.” “Strangling someone with your bare hands is up close and personal,” Chris said. “Whoever did this went to a lot of trouble to hide the body. The killer got the barrel, sealed it, and concealed it in a location he knew would remain undiscovered for a considerable period.” “The homeowner had lived in that house for three years,” Doris said. “Law enforcement completely cleared him. Law enforcement has accounted for every woman in his life. Francine researched every homeowner from the time the house was built forty years ago to the present and discovered no potential victims. One of her sources told me that law enforcement has done the same. There’s no missing woman connected to anyone who lived in or had any connection to the crime scene.” “Did they find anything else in the barrel besides the body and dirty motor oil?” Helen asked. “The victim wore white jean shorts and a blue and white striped shirt with shoulder pads,” Doris said, “Now the shoulder pads tell me that this murder must have taken place in the 80s. Shoulder pads were a big thing then.” Chris mentioned the house was built in ‘83. “Forensics determined the clothes were all upscale designer brands,” Doris said. “Even her underwear was expensive. We’re not talking about Rodeo Drive. But we are talking about Macy’s or Bloomingdale’s. The type of woman that people would notice if she had disappeared.” “That points to our victim having an expensive taste in clothes,” Helen said. “I’d say,” Doris said. “Not only was she wearing designer clothes, but jewelry, too. She also had diamond sand dollar earrings. We're looking at a woman with means.” “Someone has to have reported her missing,” Helen said. “We just haven’t found the report yet.” “Did they find any other jewelry?” Chris asked. “Wedding ring?” “Nothing. No purse or wallet or driver’s license giving her name,” Doris replied. “That’d be too easy,” Helen said while giving Sterling a cracker with a slice of cheddar cheese on it. “No hit with her DNA in the national database?” “Or familial DNA.” “You said she had given birth,” Helen cast a glance at Chris sitting next to her. “That means she’s someone’s mother. She’s got family out there looking for her.” “We’ll find her. The Geezer Squad is on the case.” Doris gathered the reports and cleared the table for dinner. 

“How did your helpers do?” The sly grin on her face revealed she knew the answer to her question. Chris let out a sigh filled with exhaustion. He laid his head in his arms on the table. “The highlight was the last hour when Katelyn got a splinter in her finger. While Sierra, Victor, and Buck administered first aid, Nikki and I collected the last two truckloads of hay and hauled them to the barn.” “Three people to remove one splinter?” Helen asked with a laugh. “Katelyn takes after her grandma,” Chris said. “I never needed a splinter to wrap a man around my little finger.” Doris winked at Helen. “All I needed was to turn on my irresistible charm.” “Why didn’t you use your irresistible charm on Elliott to get him to help me bale hay?” Chris asked in a sleepy tone. “He would have, but he had to go help that friend of his down in Georgia. Do you know where you made your mistake?” Doris shook the case file at him. “You should have had a bigger family. When I was growing up on our farm down in southern West Virginia, hay season was a big thing. All our aunts and uncles and cousins would come out. The women would cook all day and make desserts while the men would be out baling and hauling in the hay. Then afterwards, we’d be eating and gathering around the bonfire and shooting off firecrackers.” She continued to recount stories about her childhood in rural Appalachia as she put away her research and prepared dinner. Their voices lowered to a very dull roar in Chris’s ears as he drifted off to sleep. “Who’s that?” His mother’s question crashed through his slumber.

~~~~

Whoa, did you notice that the setting for at least part of this latest case is centered on West Virginia and Morgantown, where I used to live, as part of the search area? Carr is known for her novels being set in this particular area, but tapping into Morgantown was a bit more closer home for me. Made me connect more right from the beginning!

Before we go any further, this book starts out as a specific cold case, but becomes so much more that you will boggle at the complexity of your story line... So be prepared!

Christ Matheson is the ancestral main character; however, his wife, Helen, and her sister really set the stage for the entire book. You see, quite recently his wife's sister, Kassie, contacted her. The two sisters have been estranged in recent years... The girls lost both their parents at early ages. They both disappeared. Helen had been adopted and had a better life than Kassie who had been in several different homes during her childhood. But Kassie had come to realize that she needed to find some place--somebody--to be a part of a family for the rest of her life. She started with finding Helen and asking her to work with her to find out what had happened to her parents... And once that decision was made, of course, the entire Geezer group became part of the search. These individuals, by the way, all have some type of background that provides them a special expertise by which they can help in a formal criminal investigation. And when they started working a case, the pace, I must say, is much faster than any normal police procedural book you will ever read! LOL!

Once a plan has been made, they start the investigation, which almost immediately, led to the discovery of a body. It was not the girls mother, but the body did still wear costly jewelry, which could be identified and allow moving on to the next step in the search. In fact, each action that was discovered, soon resulted in the discovery of more bodies!

Just not the girls parents!

Staring out at the historic downtown buildings and the distant silhouette of Halliehurst Mansion against the forested ridge, Helen nodded. “Or maybe we just got bigger.” Her voice was quiet, laced with the weight of questions they’d carried for decades. They were here to uncover the truth about their parents, and in this quiet Appalachian town—gateway to endless trails yet rooted in its own stubborn history—that truth felt closer, and more daunting, than ever. Kassie turned at a light to take an exit ramp off the freeway leading into Elkins. “You can be the bad cop. You’re good at that.” Shooting a sideways glance at her sister, Helen ignored the dig.

“I used to entertain you kids by singing Dolly Parton songs.” “And play the guitar,” Helen said. “That was me.” Dani did a deep bow at the waist. “I perform most weekends at the local saloons.”

But soon they were traveling back to where the family clan was still living. Helen visited first and was immediately welcomed back with their pet name for her--this would be important as the search gets more tense! But an interesting event they discovered was that their mother had become involved with a group of call girls called the Suzy Qs, but she was known for her helping them with the business management rather than actually being involved... And all the SuzyQs that were still in town praised what their mother had taught them to be able to get out on their own and made a better life...

“Suzi Q was a class operation,” Dani said. “Didn’t any of you feel you were being exploited as sex workers?” Helen asked. “Nobody grows up saying they want to become a sex worker.” Trudy shrugged her shoulders. “In my case, I was being sexually abused by my stepfather. I ran away at sixteen–to Abby’s house. We had been best friends forever. I happened upon what Abby’s mother did for a living. I thought, why not charge for it? At least I could support myself. Your mother tried to talk me out of it.” “My grandmother was a prostitute.” Kassie stared at her uneaten slice of pizza. “My mother was a madam. My father came from a family of thieves.” “Oh, so you know about that,” Dani said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Do you ever regret taking up that line of work?” Helen asked. “I did what I had to do to survive,” Trudy said. “When it was time to turn the page on that chapter, I turned it and never looked back.” She leaned toward them. “Your mother wasn’t proud of what your grandmother did. She tried to get her out of that work. But just when she thought she was making headway, your grandmother would slide right back into it. She made good money, and she needed it to support her bad habits.” “Being level-headed, Abby could see things more clearly than any of us,” Stephanie said. “We all had baggage. Mostly low self-esteem. Abby knew we needed someone with a steady hand to guide and encourage us to look toward a future beyond Suzi Q.” “Use Suzi Q as a stepping stone to something better,” Helen said. 

As with most stories these days, we soon are introduced to the fact that Helen and Kassie had come from the wrong side of town and had been frowned upon by those with money or power--and there is both. I really don't know whether it is on purpose, or whether every rich family acts like many political families or their rich neighbors, but we certainly have them in this book... 

And that leads me to a point I especially wanted to mention about Lauren's books...Readers will be totally involved in "life..." with every facit... One minute the team will be involved in searching for possible cars in a waterway. While Helen, watches her sister dance in shadows as she waits for her friend who will be searching for any cars. Helen hides, not wanting to spoil her sister's moments of joy as she waits to have her close friend join them... For me, this helps to blunt the vision of the crimes that had been committed years ago, while, these breaks of wanting to be with a loved one allows us to gain warmth and safety, as we realize we are not alone in any type of tragedy... Carr excels at this type of twist and turn from one type of scene to another!

It was those in the higher class of town who conceived the story that Helen and Kassie's father had run away with a wife of another to go to Hollywood... But as the investigation developed in depth material, there was no evidence of their father being the man who had traveled out of state. Indeed, soon there was evidence that the woman he supposedly went with, was not the one who traveled out of town--in fact, did anybody? Yet the same rumor was repeated over and over and over, as if lies could make something false become true...

In fact, there was only one specific clue about, on the other hand, what had happened to their mother years later... And it was that Kassie, at age 5, had seen her mother get into a van with Pee Wee Herman... with his famous pinstriped suit... Could a child have correctly remembered that image for decades?

The group settled in, voices dropping lower, the office suddenly feeling smaller—and the stakes, somehow, larger. Outside, the dining room carried on with its usual clatter, but here, forty-five years of secrets had just surfaced...

“Can’t you see that those of us living in the present have lives to live? Some shadows are best left alone.” “Would you be saying that if it was your daughter who went missing and Destiny here had to grow up without her mother?”

You may think we are coming to the end of the story...but you'd be wrong...Wonderfully wrong!!! Because this author not only closes out every single issue/murder event, she presents a fantastic scene for each! Some are funny, some are sad, some reveal accountability which is much needed these days... You get the idea, right? Because this author is one of the best to be found for a totally unique type of family drama which happens to include exciting and intense scenes, one of which has to be read to believe, when Sterling acts to save the day! The signaling between Chris and his K-9 was so extraordinary, I'd defy anybody to figure out exactly how it occurred, unless you're a dog master too! LOL

“Always wanted to flatten high society. Feels better than I imagined.”

Helen and Kassie walked down the aisle together, heads high, family—blood and chosen—following to the front. The organ played “Amazing Grace.” Jethro stepped to the pulpit. “Dearly beloved,” he began, voice carrying to the rafters, “we gather to lay Michael and Abigail Hartman to rest—two souls taken too soon but never forgotten. They leave behind children who carried their light through the dark, and a family fractured too long. Today, that fracture mends.” He looked out over Hartmans, Suzi Q ladies, Geezers, and cousins. “Mike and Abby didn’t see this day. But I believe they’re watching. And I believe they’re smiling.”

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This one is a Personal Favorite for Me!

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