It starts with some innocent family fun. Writer Stephen Barrow's divorced wife, involved in a second marriage, has willingly given Barrow the desired custody of their six-year-old daughter, Penny. Father and daughter share a relationship that is tender, poignant, and funny. Their home life in a small upstate New York town is a happy and entirely wholesome one.
One evening Penny, in her bath, delightedly pulls her shampoo-stiffed hair into what she thinks of as the horn of a "unicorn", and her father takes her picture. When she "moons" him and says, "Take this one!" he clicks his shutter to oblige, since the role of film was finished. Or so the mechanically challenged Barrow believed.
The next day, the local pharmacy clerk using the photo machine is shocked by the snapshot, decides Stephen is a child pornographer, and calls the police, who arrest him. This is only the first step in Stephen Barrow's descent into hell. A small-town police chief basking in a "real case", a vengeful ex-wife, a fledgling psychologist who tailors her patients' responses to fit her self-serving preconceptions, a district attorney facing reelection, and more all push Barrow deeper and deeper into a legal quagmire. In the end, everything he has is taken from him - his freedom, his belongings, and most devastating of all, his beloved daughter.
Genre: Mystery
One evening Penny, in her bath, delightedly pulls her shampoo-stiffed hair into what she thinks of as the horn of a "unicorn", and her father takes her picture. When she "moons" him and says, "Take this one!" he clicks his shutter to oblige, since the role of film was finished. Or so the mechanically challenged Barrow believed.
The next day, the local pharmacy clerk using the photo machine is shocked by the snapshot, decides Stephen is a child pornographer, and calls the police, who arrest him. This is only the first step in Stephen Barrow's descent into hell. A small-town police chief basking in a "real case", a vengeful ex-wife, a fledgling psychologist who tailors her patients' responses to fit her self-serving preconceptions, a district attorney facing reelection, and more all push Barrow deeper and deeper into a legal quagmire. In the end, everything he has is taken from him - his freedom, his belongings, and most devastating of all, his beloved daughter.
Genre: Mystery
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