Thread of Betrayal

In Thread of Betrayal, the third novel in the seven book Joe Tyler series, author Jeff Shelby picks up the chase for Elizabeth, Tyler’s daughter who was kidnapped eight years earlier when she was just eight years old. She was taken right out of Joe’s front yard in Coronado, a community in San Diego. Having finally found evidence that she is alive, Joe learned that Elizabeth just become a runaway teen who has fled from her “foster home” in Minneapolis and headed towards Denver. After having chased phantom leads about his daughter’s whereabouts for the last eight years which he never wanted to share with his ex-wife, Joe contacted his ex-wife Lauren who still lived in the home in Coronado where Elizabeth was taken. Lauren joined him in Minnesota and headed to Denver with him.

But, Joe became suspicious of his contacts in Coronado, the very contacts in the police department there who had seemed to be assisting him as he had searched for his daughter over the years, now thinking that someone there may have been instrumental in his daughter’s disappearance. This is the betrayal hinted at in the book’s title. Joe and Lauren found the boyfriend who drove Elizabeth (currently known by her foster name of Ellie Corzine) to Denver, but by then, she had a fight with her boyfriend and made him drop her off. Then they found the friend’s house where she had gone only to find that they had missed her by seconds as she borrowed enough money to get onto a plane for LA. It seems that Elizabeth was recovering some memories of her kidnapping that she was determined to follow back to California. When Joe she was on the plane as the doors to the jet way closed, he completely lost it when the ground crew would not let him board the plane or halt the plane from pulling away from the gate. One can’t go crazy in an airport without drawing a lot of attention, and Joe was arrested and put on a no-fly list. After having been so close, Joe and Lauren had lost Elizabeth once again.

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There was much more to the plot, but this story has a happy ending, sort of. Joe and Lauren do succeed in making direct contact with Elizabeth, but she was confused by her old memories, the lies she had been told by her “foster family,’ and these new strange people who were telling her that they were her parents. Then, there were new traumas that had occurred in the process of her running away. Still a minor, finally aware that she was a kidnap victim and that her “foster parents” had not really adopted her, Elizabeth got protection from the foster child system in California, and as the book ended, she was unsure of how she wanted to proceed with all this new information. As the book ended, she was willing to meet with Joe and Lauren, and the fourth book Thread of Innocence promises a possible rapprochement for the family.