In the first award-winning Bo Bradley Mystery, Child of Silence, an old Paiute woman finds a four-year-old boy tied to a mattress in an abandoned shack in the hills above San Diego, and child abuse investigator Bo Bradley gets the case. Staff at St. Mary's Hospital for Children assume the boy is mentally impaired because he cannot talk, but Bo remembers a little sister named Laurie. The boy, like Laurie, is deaf.

Complicating things is Bo's manic depressive disorder, a troubling but occasionally valuable problem for which she almost always takes her meds. Bo tangles with the system, first in attempts to place her young client in a foster home where sign language is used, and later, after someone has tried to shoot the child, in a desperate, manicky, midnight flight into the desert to save his life.

"A sensationally fine first novel… breathtakingly well-told…"The Los Angeles Times