After more than a decade, when sisters Nikki, Sami, and Tori Knotek hear the word mom, it claws like an eagle's talons, triggering memories that have been their secret since childhood. Until now.
For years, behind the closed doors of their farmhouse in Raymond, Washington, their sadistic mother, Shelly, subjected her girls to unimaginable abuse, degradation, torture, and psychic terrors. Through it all, Nikki, Sami, and Tori developed a defiant bond that made them far less vulnerable than Shelly imagined. Even as others were drawn into their mother's dark and perverse web, the sisters found the strength and courage to escape an escalating nightmare that culminated in multiple murders.
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Three sisters. Now grown women. All live in the Pacific Northwest. PROLOGUE
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(Thomas & Mercer, 1 December 2019, 410 pages, e-book, bought from @AmazonKindle)
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This is a very harrowing book. I didn't know anything about the crimes of Shelley Knotek so I had no idea what to expect. The abuse Nikki and her sisters suffered; both physical and mental, at the hands of their own mother is horrific, almost unbelievable. I felt such sympathy for them. However, I had an issue with a lot of the content. Shelley is infamous not for this abuse for the torture over years and eventual murder of two lodgers, Kathy and Ron and for shooting her nephew Shane. Nikki and Sami still lived at home when Kathy was killed. They were old enough to have stopped it and certainly could have prevented her murder. Yet they did nothing. They were glad for the abuse Kathy suffered as it meant their mother wasn't doing it to them, as she likely would have been if Kathy hadn't been around. My sympathy for the sisters and what they experienced only stretches so far. I feel very strongly they should have been charged as accessories to their mother's crimes. The book tries to paint them as some sort of saints for what they lived through, yet they didn't lift a finger to stop two people being abused and tortured over a number of years and eventually murdered.
