Read an Excerpt

Lyn Madden worked for twenty years as a prostitute, mostly in Dublin. Her career ended the night that she watched, her lover and pimp, John Cullen throw a firebomb through the window of a house, where former prostitute Dolores Lynch lived. Dolores, who had 'escaped' from prostitution some years previously, perished along with her elderly mother and aunt. That murder shocked Lyn out of her dependence on Cullen and enabled her to summon up the courage necessary to denounce him to the police. Cullen was given a life sentence and an 18-year sentence, the second of which he has completed. He has applied for temporary release, but authorities refused it. Here, in Lyn's own voice, she starts her story being escorted by two plain-clothes police officers up the gangplank to the ferry, fleeing Ireland in the hope of a safer future.