The Will to Climb

Are you a narcissist? Do you interact with someone who is? Contrary to popular belief, narcissists do not love themselves or anyone else. They cannot accept their true selves, constructing instead fixed masks that hide emotional numbness. Influenced by forces in culture and predisposed by factors in the human personality, narcissists tend to be

• More concerned with how they appear than what they feel

• Seductive and manipulative, striving for power and control

• Egotists, focused on their own interests but lacking the true values of the self -- self-expression, self-possession, dignity, and integrity

• Without a solid sense of self, which leads them to experience life as empty and meaningless

Two days before her tenth birthday Katie Beers disappeared. She had left for an outing with a close family friend,  John Esposito, and her whereabouts remained mysterious as the year druew to a close and her family grew frantic, fearing the worst. On January 13th Katie was found alive in a secret, dungeon-like vault beneath Esposito's Bay Shore, Long Island house. Families nation wide followed the story of Katie's heartwrenching ordeal, as she bravely survived the isolation until her nearly miraculous rescue. 

What he has uncovered will astound even the most informed observers of the Laci Peterson murder case and challenge the most deeply held beliefs about what really happened to Laci Peterson on Christmas Eve, 2002.

This is the first book to go inside the Peterson defense team, and the only book to detail all the evidence that the jury did not hear -- evidence that might have led to Scott Peterson's acquittal, and that will surely play a crucial part in his pending appeals.

Among the revelations in Presumed Guilty:

• Reports from numerous witnesses who saw Laci Peterson alive and well the morning of December 24, after the police claim Scott Peterson had already killed her; none of them testified at trial
• The story of another woman, eight months pregnant, who was harassed by two men the morning of December 24 only five blocks from the Peterson home
• The burglary that reportedly occurred directly across the street from the Peterson home on the morning of December 24, and the confessed burglars' questionable claims that the burglary happened days later
• Previously unreported details of the autopsy reports on Laci Peterson and her son, which cast strong doubts on key elements of the prosecution's case
• The disappearances of six pregnant women, in addition to Laci, reported missing and presumed dead within eighty miles of Modesto between 1999 and 2002

Compelling, provocative, disturbing, Presumed Guilty is the fascinating story of one lawyer's relentless efforts to find the truth behind one of the most complex and notorious murder cases in American history.

Winner of the 2007 Banff Mountain Festival Book Awards Grand Prize (The Phyllis & Don Munday Award): "A riveting account of a long-ago mountaineering disaster."—Time