SUSAN DOHERTY's award-winning debut novel, A Secret Music (2015), was followed four years later by The Ghost Garden, the biography of a woman living with schizophrenia. She has worked on staff for Maclean's, and freelanced for the International Herald Tribune, La Tribune de Gen ve, and the Independent in London; for eighteen years she ran her own advertising production company. She has served on the boards of the Royal Conservatory of Music, the Quebec Writers' Federation and Nazareth House, a home for those afflicted by addiction and homelessness. Since 2009, she has volunteered at the Douglas Institute, a psychiatric hospital, working with people living with severe mental illness. She is married to the educator Hal Hannaford.
“If fools rush in where angels fear to tread, then Susan Doherty is the holiest of fools. Her haunting, brave, brilliantly realized work exposes with a nuanced compassion the devastating effects of the ‘dark web’ that is pedophilia. Only radical love can counter radical evil, and this extraordinary book lights the way.” —James FitzGerald, author of What Disturbs Our Blood, winner of the 2010 Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize “A searing novel that cuts painfully close to the truth: the vulnerability of children, the sly grooming by sexual predators, the guilt, the fearful silence and the buried secrets of the victims—and how the Internet made all of this a multi-million-dollar business. This book will shock, scare and anger you—all the more so because it is all too real.” —Julian Sher, author of One Child at a Time: The Global Fight to Rescue Children from Online Predators