The apartment was clean. The mother was sober. The report was a lie. The system took her daughter anyway. Four-year-old Alma Varela has a braid her mother plaits every morning, a wall of crayon drawings, and a gray stuffed rabbit she carries from room to room. Caseworker Nadia Cole knows the difference between a home in trouble and a home being performed, and this one is neither. It is just a family. The anonymous report says neglect. Everything Nadia can see says the opposite. She writes it up unfounded. Twice. Then a third report comes in, and the system stops asking whether it's true. Nadia can prove the call was false. She proves it too late. A man is already carrying Alma down the stairs, and the rabbit is on the floor where no one thinks to pick it up. The foster home is rated excellent. Within weeks, the drawings stop. The talking stops. A four-year-old learns that asking for anything changes nothing. Until one morning, in a dark room, she says the only thing she has left. I want to go home. To get Alma out, Nadia will have to break every rule she has followed for six years. And the reason she cannot let this child go is the one thing she has never told anyone. She was one of these children once. Failure to Protect is the first book in The Horizon Cases, a Nadia Cole thriller, from the author of The Privilege . For fans of Jodi Picoult, Lisa Jewell, and Lisa Scottoline.