Lizzie's Lullaby

Book excerpt: Say you’re a wicked woman who calls herself Satin because she thinks she’s smoother than silk. You’re a talent scout for a perverted prince looking for the perfect little girl to be his next “daughter”—a very special girl he can train to fulfill his every twisted fantasy until she grows too old for his taste. So when you stumble on a runaway seven-year-old in a Portland shopping mall that you know from painful personal experience is a perfect fit, you snatch the kid and cash in, right? Satin tries to do exactly that in Lizzie’s Lullaby, launching a rollercoaster ride through the underside of Portland in the 1990s. The snatch goes without a hitch, but the process of cashing in reveals that this girl is actually the worst choice possible for this endeavor. She comes complete with Wiley, an imperfect father who would rather die than see her harmed; with Leon, a force of nature who combines the loyalty of a friendship forged in fire with the conscience of a shark; and with her own indomitable belief that she is very precocious for her age—a belief that she proves justified from one end of Lizzie’s Lullaby to the other.