Violence Against Girls and Women – When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McClain

Due to the subject nature (abducted/missing young girls and teens), this was a tough book to get through. There is some violence, a lot of emotional stress and accounts of emotional abuse, and the suspense of the dark plot details. The book is set in 1993, during the search for abducted and murdered Polly Klaas, a young girl from Petaluma, CA.

Anna Hart is a San Francisco detective, specializing in missing persons. After a personal tragedy, unrevealed till much later in the book, her husband insists on a separation. Anna heads to Mendocino, the small California town where she grew up with foster parents Eden and Hap, who were kind and nurturing to her after the very difficult past of her earlier childhood. She finds a small cabin in the woods to rent, and acquires a dog.

Anna becomes embroiled in the search for Cameron, a missing girl, one of a few concurrent cases in Northern California, including the Klaas case, which is receiving a lot of media attention, partly because actress Winona Ryder, who grew up in Petaluma, has taken a personal interest. 

Cameron, the adopted daughter of a former actress and her producer husband, is a beautiful but sad girl who is dealing with early trauma, much of which is unknown to her parents. During Anna's intensive detective work on the case, she uncovers much about Cameron's early childhood, and finds Cameron's protective older brother, Hector, from whom she was separated when she was adopted.

While searching for Cameron, Anna is confronted with her own unresolved, unreconciled personal tragedies, both her current situation, and the earlier ones that haunt her. She becomes reacquainted with Will, the sheriff and an old friend, and Caleb, another, whose twin sister Jenny disappeared during their high school days.

The multiple threads of Cameron's case, and that of another girl named Shannen, and Anna's inner search for resolution with her past coincide and collide throughout this novel, but it never descends into melodrama, as the situations described are all too common, and in the Klaas case, real. 

By the end, nearly all of the tensions and conflicts reach a conclusion, though author Paula McClain does leave one untied thread...which I found both surprising and disappointing.

This subject matter is very disturbing, and since we read and hear about similar cases every day, it's also an important, urgent topic, one that certainly should not be diminished or dismissed by some of our political structures, which seem, in some cases, to care less about the ongoing care and nurturing of children, than than they do about their so-called "pro-life" stance, which ends once birth takes place. Those politicians, who are limiting the rights of women and girls, and who refuse to provide adequate funding to local governments who need help combatting the type of crime addressed in this book, need to be voted out. Please think about that in this very important election year.