The Lost Ones: A Novel - Hardcover

She Won’t Stop Until the Truth is Found . . .

A DARK, COMPULSIVELY READABLE PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE DEBUT, THE FIRST IN A NEW SERIES FEATURING NORA WATTS—A CHARACTER HEARTBREAKINGLY TROUBLED, EMOTIONALLY COMPLEX, AND IRRESISTIBLY COMPELLING.

The call comes in just after five in the morning. . . . 

“I’ve never heard the name Everett Walsh before, but according to him I may know something about a missing girl. He does not tell me what, though. I consider not meeting him but he sounds desperate and if there’s one thing that draws me more than persistence, it’s desperation. Even though finding people is part of what I do for a living, what would I possibly know about a missing girl to warrant a call at this hour?”

It begins with a phone call that Nora Watts has dreaded for fifteen years—since the day she gave up her newborn daughter for adoption. Bonnie has vanished. The police consider her a chronic runaway and aren’t looking for her, leaving her desperate adoptive parents to reach out to her birth mother as a last hope.

A biracial product of the foster system, transient, homeless, scarred by a past filled with pain and violence, and cursed with unnervingly dark eyes that absorb the light around them—and can pierce deep into a person’s soul—Nora knows intimately what happens to vulnerable girls on the streets. Caring despite herself, she sets out to find Bonnie with her mutt, Whisper, as her only companion. While she risks reopening wounds that have never really healed, she plunges into the darkness with little to protect her but her instincts and a freakish ability to detect truth from lies.

The search uncovers a puzzling conspiracy that leads Nora on a harrowing journey of deception and violence, from the gloomy rain-soaked streets of Vancouver to the icy white mountains of the Canadian interior, to the beautiful and dangerous island where she will face her most terrifying demon. All to save a girl she wished had never been born.

Sheena Kamal holds an HBA in political science from the University of Toronto, and was awarded a TD Canada Trust scholarship for community leadership and activism around the issue of homelessness. Kamal has also worked as a crime and investigative journalism researcher for the film and television industry—academic knowledge and experience that inspired this debut novel. She lives in Vancouver, Canada.