The Last Stone by Mark Bowden

This story is especially chilling because it's non-fiction.  Two young girls are taken from a mall and never come home again.  They were 10 and 12.  And it took 40 years before their killer had to pay for his crime.  No one will ever know the complete truth...

Atlantic Monthly Press sent me an ARC of this book to read for review (thank you).  It will be published April 2nd.

The story begins with a cop looking into cold case files.  As he reads the old records, he decides to talk to someone new.  A young man told police he had seen them talking to man but then they found out his confession was a lie.  They ignored him after that.  But this cop isn't going to.

He visits him in jail and finds out bits and pieces that begin to go together in a big old puzzle.  The young man was a chronic liar, did drugs and booze, and even raped children.  But he claims he didn't kill them.

What the detectives find is that he was himself was abused by his father.  It turns out the whole family is a hotbed of incest and other abuse.  As the man tries to convince them that other family members did the bad things and he was only an observer, they test his stories and find out that's all they are is stories.

Each of the detectives thinks the girls died at the hand of the man in jail but they each have a different version of the truth.  As the man finishes his life in jail, he alone knows what really happened and you can bet he won't tell you...

This tale is sad but it sure points out how dysfunctional families can grow warped children.  Evil is stamped through the entire family.