A little over thirty years ago, on a June day just before sunset … a man came toward me with a length of piano wire stretched between his hands, and the intention of ending my days. I was 14 years old and many had already died at his hands … I have my sister to thank that I am here to tell what happened that day. Two ties, it was my sister who saved me, though I was not able to do the same for my sister.

 Rachel Torricelli and her younger sister Patty are growing up in a small, poor, suburban area in Marin County, southern California, eight miles north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Their father is the chief homicide detective, a charming, romantic, habitual philanderer whose escapades have shattered his marriage. Patty is a gifted athlete but hardly speaks except to Rachel to whom she is devoted. Rachel believes she has the gift of seeing the future and has a scarily mature understanding of her parents relationship.

“The problem between our parents, maybe, was that of all the women, our mother may have been the only one who appeared immune to our father’s romantic tactics, and for a man accustomed to charming the female population of the entire San Francisco Bay area this must have taken the wind right out of his sales.”

To all effect abandoned by their mother, a depressive who has retreated into her own private world after the breakdown of the marriage,  the sisters are content to be left to their own devices and spend much of their time playing imaginative games in the sprawling foothills of the mountains close to their home. Then the first body is found thrusting their father  into the limelight.  For Rachel, his

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