If You Tell

Shelly Knotek presented to her neighbours in Raymond, Washington as an ordinary mother. Inside the farmhouse she and her husband Dave subjected their three daughters, a nephew and two lodgers to a sustained regime of abuse, humiliation and torture that went on for years. Three of those people died.

Gregg Olsen reconstructs the household from the inside, largely through the surviving sisters, and the book is as much about how such a thing sustains itself as about what was done. Shelly controlled who spoke to whom, what could be said outside the house, and what each of the girls believed about the others.

What eventually broke it was the sisters. Olsen follows their adult lives, the point at which they compared accounts, and the process by which they got their mother arrested and prosecuted. Difficult material, handled at the pace of a reported narrative rather than a sensational one.