Audiobooks by Claudia Rowe

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Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care

Told through the stories of eight former foster youth, a jolting exploration of a broken system from an award-winning journalistBy the time Maryanne was 19 years old, she was on trial for murder. After having been in and out of the foster homes for nearly a decade, she was trafficked, assaulted, and ultimately pointed a gun at her assailant—and pulled the trigger. She fled, but with no family and no real friends, it didn’t take long for the police to catch up with her. However, in court, the defense blamed not the traffickers, nor Maryanne, but the state itself—or rather, the foster care system, which turns the state into the parent of hundreds of thousands of children. The state of Washington didn’t listen, but Claudia Rowe did.Wards of the State by journalist and author Claudia Rowe widens an eye-opening case from a true-crime lens to an exploration of the foster care-to-prison pipeline. The system is broken––hundreds of thousands of children every year leave America’s $30 billion dollar foster care system and enter its prisons, where in some cases, 75 percent of inmates are former foster kids. Through the stories of eight former foster kids, Rowe illustrates exactly where, when, and how the system is failing the children that it parents. With accounts from psychologists to advocates to court room judges to the former foster children themselves, Wards of the State paves a road to reform by pulling back the curtain on the heartbreaking realities faced by children in a system that fails its most vulnerable youth.

Claudia Rowe (Author), Morgan Hallett, TBD (Narrator)

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The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder

In this superb work of literary true crime—a spellbinding combination of memoir and psychological suspense—a female journalist chronicles her unusual connection with a convicted serial killer and her search to understand the darkness inside us. "Well, well, Claudia. Can I call you Claudia? I’ll have to give it to you, when confronted at least you’re honest, as honest as any reporter. . . . You want to go into the depths of my mind and into my past. I want a peek into yours. It is only fair, isn’t it?"—Kendall Francois In September 1998, young reporter Claudia Rowe was working as a stringer for the New York Times in Poughkeepsie, New York, when local police discovered the bodies of eight women stashed in the attic and basement of the small colonial home that Kendall Francois, a painfully polite twenty-seven-year-old community college student, shared with his parents and sister. Growing up amid the safe, bourgeois affluence of New York City, Rowe had always been secretly fascinated by the darkness, and soon became obsessed with the story and with Francois. She was consumed with the desire to understand just how a man could abduct and strangle eight women—and how a family could live for two years, seemingly unaware, in a house with the victims’ rotting corpses. She also hoped to uncover what humanity, if any, a murderer could maintain in the wake of such monstrous evil. Reaching out after Francois was arrested, Rowe and the serial killer began a dizzying four-year conversation about cruelty, compassion, and control; an unusual and provocative relationship that would eventually lead her to the abyss, forcing her to clearly see herself and her own past—and why she was drawn to danger.

Claudia Rowe (Author), Cassandra Campbell (Narrator)

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