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.

Book Blurb Friday: a couple near water

Each week, Lisa Ricard Claro presents Book Blurb Friday at her blog, Writing in the Buff. She offers a photo (this week from the camera of Sioux Roslawski) for us to imagine as the cover of a book. Then, writer-bloggers are to imagine the book itself and write a blurb for it, a blurb to turn browsers into buyers. However, there's a catch: the blurb must be 150 words or less. It's a challenge, and it's fun.
Here is my submission of 146 words, not including the title:
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NOT THE TITANIC...

The passengers from the Costa Concordia wept. The ship’s chief purser, who had worked so hard to save so many of them, had not yet been found.

“We’re going to find out what happened here,” one passenger, a reporter for a Canadian daily paper, said to his wife as she cried on his shoulder. “We’re going to find out and we’re going to tell the world.”

They did find out, and Serge Suffield wasted no time in telling the world. This, his first book, tells of people who perished; firefighters and scuba divers who searched; confusion and false reports; and the captain’s attitude as it contrasted with the kindness of the people of the Tuscan town of Giglio who opened their homes, schools and churches in the middle of the night to help survivors.

What did this Canadian reporter find in his search for the truth?

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Blog owner's note: The chief purser of the Costa Concordia was rescued the day after the ship ran aground. He had worked to save as many passengers and crew as he could until he broke his leg. There is no Serge Suffield, ace reporter, as far as I know, but the people of Giglio, in the Italian region of Tuscany, did welcome the ship's survivors with open arms.