Quotes from Gregg Olsen

She was held captive by love, fear, and the church's promise that if she prayed harder, everything would get better.

All of what the place had been was the great dream of a woman, a doctor named Linda Burfield Hazzard.

Claire and Dorothea are ill because they can afford to be ill.

The blanket the nun gave me smells like someone tried to Febreze it into submission.

He could talk a ravenous dog off the back end of a meat wagon.

The next morning, Shane, swollen and battered, renewed his vow to run away. He told Nikki that if she didn't go with him, he'd go on his own. He'd had enough.

But, Kristen, the blood," he says, "I don't know how the blood got there." He glances at me, then back at his drink. He looks like he might cry. "Honey, you cut your finger at work," I say, though unconvincingly.

Greta worked her way toward the back, skipping past racks and stacks of records marked with the year. One after another. It was as if she were going back in time, getting younger as she went and heading toward the girl she'd been back then. Young. Impressionable. A follower. The spark of memories made her shake her head. She'd come so far since then.

We were a sinking ship headed for the bottom of the ocean.

If Anna passed by, it brought Lara a shudder of relief. Only then could Lara take a breath. A very deep one.

She was bitter toward her parents, estranged from her sisters, and simply marinated in negativity. It was as if she felt some deep hatred of her fate and was too weak to fight against the middleness that was consuming her.

handful. You can't expect

Orphaned daughters of a well-to-do English officer in the Imperial Army Medical Service, Dorothea was born in Trichinopoli, India, Claire in London. And though schooled in Switzerland, England, and France and well traveled, the sisters, especially Claire, exhibited a childlike naïveté and innocence that sometimes left them a target of manipulation by those with dubious intentions.

No lube needed, I just primed the pump," the man said. Everything that was happening to Celesta was beyond wrong, but what was happening now was beyond her comprehension. She screamed out in pain. "Shut up, bitch!" said the man who had raped her first. The other remained silent while violating Celesta with some kind of a cylindrical device. It was rigid, cool, not made of flesh. The

What happened to the days when everyone was on the same page because what we saw and read was handed to us?

well, I don't think I'm equipped to raise our daughter.

Truly gifted predators—those born to it—just know.

I wonder now how much of her depression was chemical and how much was caused by me.

It takes only the mention of a single word to take her back to the unthinkable.

touching on the points of two lives that had once intersected, and were now reunited.

Mistakes are dominoes, falling on one another in a mechanical, unstoppable progression

Pacific Coast and Vancouver Island's Empress, a stately hotel that held its surroundings like a grand, decorated cake above the seawater in which the island seemed to float.

beloved governess, Margaret Conway.

I was the asteroid that hovered just outside his orbit.