But the perpetrator remains at large, meaning neither Busby, nor his wife, nor their three children are safe. Where John's chapters provide the grim facts, it is Cylin's authentically childlike perspective that, in revealing the cost to her innocence, renders the tragic experience most searingly. The Year We Disappeared 12.99 Buy Now by Cylin Busby & John Busby A peaceful summer night is shattered by gunfire as an unseen assailant tries to murder police officer John Busby. “But you're lucky-you don't have to go to school”) and are later forsaken as classmates' parents deem friendship with them too risky. John is consumed with anger at the police's refusal to pursue the likeliest suspects (“and planned to stay angry until I got back at the bastards who did this to me”) Cylin, then nine, is baffled as she and her two older brothers attract unwelcome attention (“Everyone thinks your dad is going to die,” a cousin tells her. Eventually the family went into hiding in Tennessee, but arguably their “disappearance” takes place long before they move-as John and his daughter, Cylin, alternately narrate, readers can see how the shooting erased the family's sense of themselves. In 1979, in an underworld-style hit, a gunman shot John Busby, a policeman in Cape Cod a fluke saved John's life, but he was permanently disfigured and disabled, and the family placed under 24-hour protection.

The blasts that followed left Johns jaw on the passenger seat of his car-literally. Her police officer father, John, was driving to his shift when someone leveled a shotgun at his window. No one with even a marginal interest in true crime writing should miss this page-turner, by turns shocking and almost unbearably sad. When Cylin Busby was nine years old, she was obsessed with Izod clothing, the Muppets, and a box turtle she kept in a shoebox.

The Year We Disappeared by Cylin Busby