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🧲 Books like this

Afraid

Mandasue Heller · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Nickel Plated

Aric Davis · 200 pages

Raised in abusive foster homes, Nickel escapes at the age of ten and pays his way by blackmailing online pedophiles, selling marijuana to high school students, and investigating crimes. When a beautiful high school girl named Arrow asks him to find her runaway sister Shelby, Nickel takes the case, but soon discovers that finding Shelby is one thing, surviving is another.

Foster CareChild AbuseCrimeTeen Protagonist
❤️

Dime

E.R. Frank · 336 pages

Fourteen-year-old Dime, a foster child in Newark, New Jersey, finds love and family as a prostitute, but when her pimp rejects her for a new girl, will Dime have the strength to leave?

Foster CareChild AbuseDarkTeen Protagonist
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Allegedly

Tiffany D. Jackson · 400 pages

When Mary, a teenager living in a group home, becomes pregnant, authorities take another look at the crime for which Mary was convicted when she was nine years old.

Foster CareChild AbuseDarkTeen Protagonist
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White Oleander

Janet Fitch · 390 pages

Everywhere hailed as a novel of rare beauty and power, White Oleander tells the unforgettable story of Ingrid, a brilliant poet imprisoned for murder, and her daughter, Astrid, whose odyssey through a series of Los Angeles foster homes-each its own universe, with its own laws, its own dangers, its own hard lessons to be learned-becomes a redeeming and surprising journey of self-discovery.

Foster CareChild AbuseTeen ProtagonistDark
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The Butterfly House

Katrine Engberg · 352 pages

"A compelling new crime thriller featuring Copenhagen-based police detectives Jeppe Korner and Anette Werner, who work to solve a series of sordid murders that have roots in the care of vulnerable hospital patients and at-risk children -- and to expose a murderer who specializes in cold, cold blood..."-- Six days ago a paperboy on his route in central Copenhagen stumbled upon the naked body of a

Foster CareChild AbuseCrimeDark
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Barely Breathing

Rebecca Donovan · 592 pages

Foster CareChild AbuseTeen ProtagonistDark
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Darling Girls

Sally Hepworth

Foster CareChild AbuseDarkFemale Lead
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The Girl Who Played with Fire

Stieg Larsson · 677 pages

On the eve of publisher Mikael Blomkvist's story about sex trafficking between Eastern Europe and Sweden, two investigating reporters are murdered. And even more shocking for Mikael Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander--the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker who came to his aid years before.

Child AbuseCrimeHuman TraffickingDark
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Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver · 560 pages

"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose." Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in hi

Foster CareChild AbuseDarkTeen Protagonist
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Into the Water

Paula Hawkins · 388 pages

"A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged. Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the car

CrimeChild AbuseDarkTeen Protagonist
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Memory in Death

J.D. Robb, Nora Roberts · 337 pages

A Eve Dallas Investigation In Death New York Lieutenant Eve Dallas has walking a tightrope between her professional duties and her private demons. Eve Dallas is one tough cop. She's got no problem dealing with a holiday reveler in a red suit who plunges thirty-seven stories and gives new meaning to the term "sidewalk Santa." But when she gets back to the station and Trudy Lombard shows up, i

Foster CareChild AbuseCrimeFemale Lead
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The Boy in the Suitcase

Lene Kaaberbol, Agnete Friis · 315 pages

Nina Borg, a Red Cross nurse, wife, and mother of two, is a compulsive do-gooder who can’t say no when someone asks for help—even when she knows better. When her estranged friend Karin leaves her a key to a public locker in the Copenhagen train station, Nina gets suckered into her most dangerous project yet. Inside the locker is a suitcase, and inside the suitcase is a three-year-old boy: naked an

Child AbuseCrimeDarkHuman Trafficking
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Finding Katie: The Diary of Anonymous, A Teenager in Foster Care

Beatrice Sparks · 192 pages

This appealing teen read tells the story of Katie, a teen from an abused home, and her journey through foster care. Katie is always surrounded by wealth, but feels terribly alone because of the secret horror of her angry, abusive father.

Foster CareChild AbuseTeen ProtagonistFemale Lead
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Before I Let You Go

Kelly Rimmer · 384 pages

Foster CareChild AbuseDarkFemale Lead
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When We Were Silent

Fiona McPhillips · 320 pages

Child AbuseCrimeTeen ProtagonistDark
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Ellen Foster

Kaye Gibbons · 126 pages

Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.

Foster CareChild AbuseTeen ProtagonistFemale Lead
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The Butterfly Garden

Dot Hutchison · 333 pages

"Near an isolated mansion lies a beautiful garden. In this garden grow luscious flowers, shady trees...and a collection of precious butterflies -- young women who have been kidnapped and intricately tattooed to resemble their namesakes. Overseeing it all is the Gardener, a brutal, twisted man obsessed with capturing and preserving his lovely specimens. When the garden is discovered, a survivor is

CrimeChild AbuseHuman TraffickingDark
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The Crow Girl

Erik Axl Sund · 768 pages

"The newest international crime novel sensation: a fiercely suspenseful psychological thriller in which two women--a police detective and a psychotherapist--are faced with the question: how much suffering can one human being inflict upon another before he ceases to be human and becomes a monster? In a Stockholm city park, the hideously abused body of a young boy is stumbled upon. Detective Superin

Child AbuseCrimeDarkSexual Assault Content
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Losing Hope

Colleen Hoover · 380 pages

"In Hopeless, Sky left no secret unearthed, no feeling unshared and no memory forgotten, but Holder's past remains a mystery. He is haunted by the little girl he let walk away from him and he has spent his entire life searching for her. He had hoped that he would finally gain closure and be able to rid himself of his guilt the moment they were reconnected. But he could not have anticipated that th

Foster CareChild AbuseDarkFemale Lead
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Ginny Moon

Benjamin Ludwig · 384 pages

Foster CareChild AbuseTeen ProtagonistFemale Lead
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Bad Wolf

Nele Neuhaus · 434 pages

"On a hot June day the body of a sixteen-year-old girl washes up on a river bank outside of Frankfurt. She has been brutally murdered, but no one comes forward with any information as to her identity. Even weeks later, the local police have not been able to find out who she is. Then a new case comes in: A popular TV reporter is attacked, raped, and locked in the trunk of her own car. She survives,

Child AbuseCrimeHuman TraffickingDark
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Dolores Claiborne

Stephen King · 307 pages

Suspected of killing Vera Donovan, her wealthy employer, Dolores Claiborne tells police the story of her life, harkening back to her disintegrating marriage and the suspicious death of her violent husband, Joe St. George, thirty years earlier. Dolores also tells of Vera's physical and mental decline and of her loyalty to an employer who has become emotionally demanding in recent years. ([sourc

Child AbuseCrimeDarkSexual Assault Content
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The Cellar

Minette Walters · 184 pages

"From the internationally bestselling, award-winning crime writer Minette Walters, The Cellar is a harrowing, compulsively readable novel about a family of African immigrants, the Songolis, and the dark secret they keep hidden in the depths of their seemingly respectable British home. On the day Mr. and Mrs. Songoli's young son fails to come home from school, fourteen-year-old Muna's fortunes chan

Child AbuseTeen ProtagonistHuman TraffickingDark
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The Problem with Forever

Jennifer L. Armentrout · 344 pages

Foster CareChild AbuseTeen ProtagonistFemale Lead




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