"A giggle, a crunch of gravel, a single wave of a grimy hand, and her only child was gone."
One cool April day, Mike Pritcher visits the home of his estranged wife, Lael, and takes their five-year-old son, Ace, for an overnight outing. He doesn't bring him back. When Lael calls the police, they tell her it's a domestic matter. When she calls her lawyer, he tells her she has the right to snatch Ace back. That's about it.
So that's what she sets out to do.
What follows is one of the most emotionally gripping novels Jack Olsen ever wrote: a mother's obsessive, determined search for her son across the Pacific Northwest, Canada, and finally Mexico. Near misses and sudden reversals. Searing loneliness and unshakable love. A woman reaching deep inside herself for a resourcefulness and strength she never knew she had.
"A gripping, intensely moving novel," wrote Robert Daley, author of Prince of the City. "The ending left me with tears in my eyes. There is no love like mother love, is there?"
New York Times bestselling author Jack Olsen, celebrated for his psychological depth and narrative precision in true crime, brings those same qualities to this deeply human story of parental desperation and the limits of the law. Combining intimate character drama with mounting suspense, Have You Seen My Son? is the kind of novel that keeps you reading through the night and stays with you long after the final page.
The 1996 ABC television movie of the same name, starring Lisa Hartman, was based on this book.
