Why do I write novels about rescuing kidnapped children and teenagers? One of the reasons comes from an experience we had in Europe. In the early 1990s, while living in Austria, Christine and I felt the war in the Balkans pressing close. The Croatian-Serbian conflict was tearing families apart, and we couldn’t stop thinking about the children caught in the middle of it—especially the ones left in orphanages that were themselves under fire.
I could not stop thinking about how much those...