How do you cope when you are sixteen and your rich stockbroker uncle who has been your guardian since you were eight kicks you out? Hildie Vasquez finds herself squatting in a house on the downtown East Side of Vancouver with Julia and four other young people, all with their particular predicaments. Her uncle never wanted her in the first place, she reasons. He just had to take her when her Canadian mother and Salvadoran father were killed in the El Salvador civil war.
When Julia, who has become a mother and a mentor to Hildie, is murdered in the house, Hildie refuses to flee and ends up accused of the killing. Refusing to call on help from her wealthy uncle, she appeals to Nick Carmichael, the personable young legal aid lawyer who assisted her one evening when she was in the middle of a panic attack. Her friends at the house scatter.
Hildie worries about how her friends will survive. Despite warnings, once out of the detention centre she heads back to the downtown East Side to find them. Instead she encounters Steve, Julia's former pimp, and accuses him of the murder. He retaliates by pushing her in front of a bus and when she survives, promises to finish her off later. He begins to stalk her.
Frustrated by the police slowness to act, can Hildie find a way to prove Steve is Julia's murderer? Can she figure out how to help her friends and herself to get a life? And most of all, can she grasp and come to terms with what happened to her parents and find some closure?
Reading this suspenseful teen story, you will want to read right through to the harrowing end.
