About Child of Privilege

To the casual observer, Dana Van Werner had it made.

An attractive, 19-year-old debutante born into wealth and status, her home was a mansion in an exclusive enclave walled off—in many ways--from the rest of the world.  Her place in high society was assured by the success and wealth of her father, a psychotic attorney obsessed with status, money, power, winning, and the punishment of anyone who dared interfere with him.

Their “privileged life” exacted a fearsome toll on Dana and her socialite mother Maggie.  The child’s formative years had been serenaded by the gruesome sounds of her mother being frequently beaten during her father's angry rages.  Later years would find the teenager likewise victimized by her father’s wrath—and his fists—for failing to meet his standards of achievement and perfection.

After a particularly appalling incident one night, Dana escaped her gilded prison and boarded an outbound bus—destination: anywhere.

Quickly discovering the irrelevance of her blue-blooded education, Dana was ill-prepared to face the “real world” of buses, predators, night people, jail cells, sexual exploitation, and fleabag motels.  One night even found her dancing nude in a seedy honky-tonk to earn money for a bus ticket.  All the while, she was relentlessly pursued by thugs hired by her father to bring her back under his control.  

After escaping an assault by one of those mercenaries, Dana arrived in the bucolic rural community of Beckett Junction, Colorado, where she found refuge, kindness, and love in a goodhearted deputy sheriff who offered her sanctuary in his home.

However, a jarring turn of events would conspire to draw the teenager back home—and directly into a violent and bloody showdown with her abusive father.  A lifetime of suppressed rage—stoked by humiliation, fear, and pain—would finally erupt, scalding everything and everybody in its path.

This is no “poor little rich girl” story; it’s an adult novel written in a straightforward, bold style that pulls no punches.  You’ll find neither mincing of words nor sugarcoating within its pages.  It fearlessly depicts an epidemic silently spreading behind millions of closed doors in America.

But it more importantly showcases a woman’s determination, bravery, and strength in the face of an emotionally devastating situation.  That’s the kind of story I believe deserves to be told through the written word.

Why?  Because it’s a people-fighting-back story---and I hope you'll favor me by purchasing a copy, reading it, and enjoying it.