Out of the woods A girl, a killer, and a lifelong struggle to find the way home

In 2005, Shasta Groene was eight years old and living with her family in Wolf Lodge Bay, Idaho, when Joseph Duncan invaded her home and killed her mother, her brother, and her mother's boyfriend before kidnapping Shasta and her brother Dylan. In the seven weeks that followed, Shasta was the victim of numerous assaults and witnessed her brother experience similar horrors before he was brutally murdered by Duncan, whose violent past already spanned a decade. The harrowing ordeal ended on July 2, 2005, with Duncan's arrest and Shasta's reunion with her father. But the scars Shasta bears are deep and transcend the physical, and her life since has seen its ups and downs. Prolific true-crime author Olsen (The Amish Wife, 2024) offers another exemplary narrative of unimaginable trauma that packs an emotional punch. Frank and unsparing in detail, the book describes all that Groene has experienced and how she has attempted to reclaim normalcy in a life often devoid of it.

Novelist and true crime author Olsen (The Amish Wife) paints a heartbreaking portrait of a woman haunted by her narrow escape from a serial killer. In 2005, when Shasta Groene was eight years old, a man named Joseph Edward Duncan broke into her Idaho home and murdered her mother, stepfather, and older brother before taking Shasta and her nine-year-old brother, Dylan, hostage. For the next 48 days, Duncan held the children at a campsite in Lolo National Forest, where he tortured and sexually abused them, before killing Dylan. Shasta was rescued when patrons at a Denny's recognized her and called the police. Through police transcripts and interviews with Shasta herself, Olsen catalogs her ensuing years of drug addiction, petty theft, and volatile relationships, throughout which she was plagued by memories of her attempts to save Dylan. As in Olsen's previous works of nonfiction, there's plenty of rigorous research on display, but it's his empathetic consideration of what happens to high-profile victims after news cameras stop rolling that sets this apart. Though difficult to stomach, it's moving stuff. Agent: Susan Raihofer, David Black Literary. (Aug.)

A young woman's determination to overcome deep trauma and survivor's guilt in the aftermath of an unspeakable crime. Shasta Rae Groene and her brother, Dylan, were 8 and 9 years old in the summer of 2005, when they were kidnapped from their home in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, where their mother, her boyfriend, and an older brother had just been tied up and beaten to death with a framing hammer and a rifle butt. The younger children were the actual targets of the massacre's perpetrator, Joseph Edward Duncan III, aka Jet, a sadistic pedophile and recidivist sex offender with a Messiah complex. After the murders, Duncan took the children over the Montana state line and up into the wilderness of Lolo National Forest, where he held them captive and repeatedly raped them for seven weeks while regaling them with tales of previous rapes and murders of children in California and Seattle. An unusually strong-willed and resourceful child who was more worried about her brother's life than her own, Shasta survived the ordeal, but Dylan did not. She would later say of Duncan, "I don't think he counted on the fact that I was like ten steps ahead of him." Olsen, a prolific and popular author of multiple true-crime books and fictional mysteries, became close to his subject over several years. His chief concern here is to tell the story of the therapeutic work Shasta did to try to find her way "out of the woods" of her trauma. He weaves that somewhat hopeful story together with the nauseatingly disturbing details of the crime, each parallel path unfolding through the book, dropping hints along the way of ever worse revelations to come. Not for the squeamish or seekers of uncomplicatedly happy endings. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.