Book Blurb Friday: graffiti and plush toy

Lisa Ricard Claro, on her blog Writing in the Buff, hosts Book Blurb Friday, one of my favorite memes. Each week, she posts a photo and asks us to imagine it is the cover of a book. Then, she says, we are to:

Write a book jacket blurb (150 words or less) so enticing that potential readers would feel compelled to buy the book.

Above is this week's "book cover" photographed by the very talented

Sioux Roslawski.

We've been traveling again, and one of the things I really missed was Book Blurb Friday. Here is my submission for this week...133 words.

Riley Come Home

When the police got the call about the missing child, they started the search in his parents’ neighborhood, gradually moving outward from the family home until, at last, they reached the beach.

There, they found the little boy’s toy propped against the beach’s retaining wall, and above it the stark message: Riley was Here. An arrow pointed down between “was” and “Here” as if to illustrate the starkness of the word “was”.

Commander Roslawski of the Lake Area Police Department called in reinforcements from all neighboring jurisdictions. He had seen that grinning, spike-haired graffiti face before.

Author Carmelina Vasquez takes the reader through the gamut of human emotions in her telling of the story of little Riley’s disappearance. No one in Lake Area goes unquestioned, and few go unsuspected.