Writers and Readers Network -WAS

Wives and Sisters

By Natalie R. Collins

A harrowing tale! A haunting reminder that sometimes the danger, the terror, and the terrorists are closer than you think.

Natalie Collins’ Wives and Sisters is a chilling depiction of the dangers, when the untrained Book Cover counsel, when a closed society ignores the laws of men, when men play God, when religion becomes a sanctuary for evil and crime.

Allison Jensen is just six years old when she and her best friend, Cindy, are held at gunpoint and ordered to strip. They run, but Allison trips. She awakes hours later, injured, cold, wet, and…alone. Cindy is never found.

The closed Mormon community builds a wall of silence around the incident. Allison’s questions about her friend are met with silence, avoidance, and orders to pray. Her fears, her sightings of the bearded man who haunts her days and nights met with disbelief and ignored.

Tortured by these memories and fears, Allison sinks deeper into mental anguish under the harsh hand of a father who enforces his interpretation of the strictures and covenants of the church with a belt. The loss of her mother at an early age turns her from her family and the chokehold ties of a religion she cannot understand.

Haunted and stalked by the ghosts of her past, Allison wages a battle to find herself and her place in the world. Some of the ghosts are real. The evil of the past stalks Allison still, testing her sanity and threatening her life.

Well-written, fast-paced, Natalie Collins’ Wives and Sisters is suspense filled satisfaction with a bone-chilling, thought provoking similarity to recent events. Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction, and sometimes the two blend until the lines between them disappear. I’ve had the privilege of working with Natalie Collins on several writing lists. Knowing the exact time when the inspiration for this story struck and the idea was formed, makes reading this story and its the similarities to the more recent kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart and the disappearance of Lori Hacking even more bone-chilling.

Wives and Sisters tugs at the heart and pulls at the mind. Author Natalie R. Collins, with the skill of the masters, splashes truth, and warnings against dangers of concealing truth, onto the pages of this must read thriller.