I thought the book had a good premise but lost it in the end due to the father not being overly logicial.

[Lisa]

I thought David J. Bell may have over thought the ending. Granted it was dramatic, but it just didn't feel like something a father would do.

[Adam]

Yeah, that's what held me back from giving it a better rating. I just couldn't see any father willing to go that far.

[Sheila]

Agreed--I found the father unlikeable, and couldn't understand his actions.

[Joy]

Book started out good but I also was disappointed with the father in the end. The author could have done much better with this subject matter.

[Melinda]

I agree, it had a great beginning and a lot of promise, but I don't believe that any father who loved his child as much as this one did throughout the story would do what he did.

[Gerd]

Joy wrote: "Book started out good but I also was disappointed with the father in the end. The author could have done much better with this subject matter."

Totally!
The more I think about the book, the more I grow to dislike the father.

I did feel that Bell handled his story quite well in the first half, but when Caitlin returns the whole story takes a very unfortunate shift. It suddenly isn't about what happened to her anymore, it becomes a kind of power struggle over whose possession she is.

The way her father shows few interest in her as a person, but whines about what happened to him(!) and if this is still his daughter because now she's no longer the person he wanted her to be, that made me want to smack his head against a wall, repeatedly.

[Raul]

All of you who have commented about not liking the father ... have any of you asked yourselves WHY you didn't like him? It sounds like a couple of you have touched on that, but have you really asked and answered? I think David Bell chose the more difficult road to travel by not painting the father in exactly the light most of us would have liked to see him. The truth of the matter (for most if not all of us here) is that we have never been in Tom's shoes, and I hope we never are. That being said, none of us truly knows how we would act. We all would like to believe that we would act differently, but we don't really know until we are there.

I would like to think that if I were in his shoes I would pay John Colter a secret visit some night at three in the morning, kill him, and slip away without anyone ever realizing I was gone. Then again, I might have just strangled him with my bare hands the first chance I got. But we must remember that he was also struggling to hang on to his daughter, whom he absolutely loved.

I don't believe he ever had any intention of letting her go back to Colter. He was just trying desperately to understand what happened ... maybe so he could stop hating himself for failing her in the first place.

Hats off to David Bell! Excellent job!

[Hershey]

One of the worst books I have ever struggled through. Yes I had to finish it, but that was out of sheer stubbornness.

There are no believable characters. From the disengaged mother who after only four years has decided to "move on" even after her daughter is found!

The father. Where to start. He is an a-hole, so not very likeable, but even more difficult is to understand how he would not be consumed by rage upon first meeting. Instead he has a calm conversation with a man that abducted his 12 year old daughter and raped her in a basement dungeon for four years while the rapist basically sneers at him and brags about it. It ends with the father being beaten up and berated by the abductor. In the end of the book he seems inexplicably to value hearing all the sordid details of what this pervert did with his daughter during her abduction, more than his daughter herself! He actually mulls over whether he might actually go through with trading his 16 year old daughter, like a sex slave, to this creep in exchange for these details. This perv has already proven he can take the father in a fight, so why would a father even chance taking his daughter to a dark graveyard to meet this creep especially when his daughter would have ran into his car in a second?

Caitlin. I can understand the Stockholm syndrome idea, but its pretty hard to swallow that a child would develop such a strong sexual and emotional attraction to this creep as he is presented. If he was some handsome 20 something perv maybe, but he's a 50 year old loser with bad hygiene, described as ugly, that lives with his mother. Also you'd think she'd at least be in a little shock. Even though her a-hole dad refuses to allow her any psychological counseling, you'd think SOMEONE in authority would step in and demand it even though her mother and father seem oblivious of any need for it for their obviously mentally damaged daughter.

The brother Buster is a very confused character. He adds nothing to the plot. The step father memory discrepancy doesn't make sense. Why would Buster deny the violence and then admit it only at the end?

Then the unfinished quality. What happened to the book title character....the Cemetery Girl? And her character is also puzzling. She apparently also was abused by the creep, but was allowed to run around at night? She was only 12 and the author had the chance to perhaps elevate her to somewhat replace the daughter as the one that is saved to compensate for the seemingly lost soul who at 16 will forever pine for her jailed 50 something smelly loser abuser. But she is just ignored at the end like she was never in the plot, presumably never to be saved from a runaway life of other sexual predators and drug abuse and tragedy.

Overall the book is just in very very bad taste as well. There is no serious attention or gravity given to the horrible circumstances of Caitlin's time in captivity. And the premise that an older ugly fat little man can prance around strip bars and restaurants in the same town with a girl no older than sixteen, and who knows how old she was when he first allowed her out of the basement....let alone that she was never once seen by any school friend or relative or law enforcement or ANYONE who had seen that poster all over town during those years.

I am missing so much unbelievability examples but I'll stop here. I wouldn't have wasted my time writing this but I want to help anyone out there to not waste their time with this bad pulp fiction.