Never Take No For An Answer
By Marilyn Hawes
The Book Guild pound;14.95

Could there be anything worse for a parent than hearing that one of your children is critically injured on the other side of the world and that it is touch-and-go whether she will survive?

Yes, there could. Just as Marilyn Hawes, a former music teacher, is struggling to get over this news of her daughter, another trauma breaks over her head. Police visit her and tell her a trusted friend and confidant of many years, a man who was so close to the family that he had taken her 10-year-old twin sons, Michael and Peter, to live in his house while she rebuilt her life after her divorce, is being investigated for long-standing abuse of young boys.

The police say they believe Jeffrey Carney deliberately insinuated himself into Marilyn Hawes’s family, and “groomed” her boys for abuse. She has to face the probability that they were molested over years. To Hawes it is unthinkable. This was the charismatic and successful head of the children’s former school, St Sebastian’s Church of England primary in Wokingham, Berkshire. He was the man who had encouraged her to become a school governor and later come to work as a teacher there, and a committed Christian with whom she had often discussed spiritual matters.nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;

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