Prado's latest novel centers on a mother who embarks on a mission to rescue her daughter from the mean streets of San Francisco. Margot Skinner can't bear to see her 15-year-old daughter, Robyn, dolled up in fishnets and spiked heels while her room devolves into a sty and her truancy and rebelliousness accelerate...Aided by two private investigators and a streetwise nun, Margot scours the notorious Tenderloin district in search of her runaway daughter, who may have fallen into the clutches of a local pimp named Blu Boy....Prado writes in a visceral present tense, elevating her drama with crisp, sensory details, as she skillfully employs the solid pacing and atmosphere of a crime novel....Prado commands a robust vocabulary and tells a searing tale laced with disturbingly candid insight...This taut mix of memoir, novel and crime drama succeeds through vivid writing and soulful revelations.

Growing up Catholic in a family where the reforms of Vatican II are seen as the work of Satan. It is 1972, and Veronica Chater's parents believe that Vatican II's liberalization has corrupted the Catholic Church, inviting the Holy Chastisement—an apocalypse prophesied by three shepherds in Fatima, Portugal. To spare his family this horror, Veronica's father quits the highway patrol, sells everything, and moves the family of eight from California to an isolated village near Fatima. But Portugal is no Catholic utopia, and the family schleps home penniless to join the nascent Catholic counterrevolution: attending the Latin Mass in truck garages and abandoned buildings, serving meals to religious soldiers, breeding a new member of the faithful every year. As Veronica comes of age on the fringes of the American Dream, she rebels against a fanaticism that forbids anything modern—clothes, movies, or music. This is the story, both sad and funny, of a family torn apart by religion and brought back together in spite of the injuries it inflicted on itself.