Best Intentions

De: Joseph T. Klempner

Narrado por: Jeff Cummings

It starts with some innocent family fun. Writer Stephen Barrow's divorced wife, involved in a second marriage, has given Barrow 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, playfully straightens her shampoo-stiffened hair into the horn of a "unicord," and her father takes her picture. When she "moons" him and says, "Take this one!" he clicks the shutter, although the roll 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. That is only the first step in Stephen Barrow's descent into hell. A small-town police chief, a vengeful ex-wife, a fledgling psychologist, a district attorney facing re-election - all of these and more push Barrow deeper and deeper into the depths, until everything he has is taken from him, his freedom, his belongings, and most particularly his beloved daughter.

Best Intentions is a horror story. Not a horror story of monsters from the deep or roving homicidal psychopaths, but something much worse, something that batters at the listeners' defenses. As anyone familiar with Klempner's previous books will know, he is a writer with the talent to bring his story home to his listeners. As Best Intentions (based on an actual case) unfolds, its threat becomes more and more real. This could happen to anyone. It could happen to you.

©2016 Joseph T. Klempner (P)2017 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Wonders of a Child's Pain

The story are many innocent peoples worst nightmare.

Unfortunately, those in the position who has the power to make the difference on a young child's live, can end up being the sane people that oposse hard no matter of good intentions. Black and white is Not always gray. And a young child is not without means of feeding information that can set matters right. If we care enough to see the individual as an individual not a text book majority. A suffering child has a built in survival code. Will we care enough to Pay attention to the child, get to know the child and they will inform you in their own clever way; not the form someone else may use. But, there own way they will conjure up when the system fells to look for signs. A suffering child assumes intellectual information. Steven's daughter cleverly helped herself. Children can feel when something is not right. They WILL tell you/us!

Real life's experiences call for real life skills not just text book alone. Children have instincts that provide real answers.

Great reminder that man can not direct its own footsteps and will stumble many times!

A good idea diminished by its execution.

This is a good story, with excellent narration by Jeff Cummings. The prose is acceptable but somehow the telling is heavy handed. Inspired by a true story, we're told, This is not historical fiction, and I suspect that the author exercised a great deal of poetic license in the novel. The characters all seem so extreme-the father, so naive and unable to cope; the daughter, so precocious; the female reporter and love interest, so idealistic but relatively ineffectual; the news editor and his male reporter, so exploitative, unfair, and sensationalistic; the police, so abusive and vindictive even though the evidence is so ambiguous; the DA, so underhanded, less interested in justice than in politics. Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction, but somehow this cast of characters doesn't ring true. The father's attorney seems to be more realistic, perhaps because the author was himself a defense attorney for so many years.

They must listen!

100% guaranteed you won’t regret listening to this. Captivating until the end. Well written and well narrated.

Great true story with outstanding narration!

Just read the publisher's summary and Shelley's review and then get and listen to this book. It is the true story of a complete legal system and child protective system failure that is finally set straight only by the strength and love of a 7 year old girl. There are plenty of evil people including the child psychologist and the prosecutor who should have ended up in jail, but they kept their jobs. Best Intentions, which is a bad title because their intentions were evil, was first released in September of 2016, but the story is from the 1990s.

The situations in this book will anger and upset you, but you need to listen to it.

Very good read...it could happen to anyone...

"Best Intentions" is a really good read it just goes to show you that unjust bad things can happen to anyone.