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"NAME ME. GAZE into my eyes. Study my smile and my dimples and tell me who you see. I look like an Emma. I look like an Amy. I look like a Katherine. I look like a Kathryn. I look like your best friend's sister, your sister's best friend. Introduce me. Yell for me. Let me run away and call me back. Run your fingers through my hair and whisper my name.

"Call me whatever you want; it's just a name, after all."

Those are the first two paragraphs of "The Girl She Used To Be." They draw you in to the complicated world of Melody Grace McCartney.

Melody was 6 years old when she and her parents watched a mob murder and entered the Witness Protection Program. Rebellious and angry at her perfect life being uprooted, she constantly reveals her family's true identity, and they are scooped from their home and dropped someplace new, with new names, new jobs and the same dark cloud hanging over them.

Now grown, her parents dead, Melody continues to move around, never dreaming of the future, because she has so little control over it.

During her latest stint as a teacher, she gets bored, so she invents a threatening phone call, forcing the feds to swoop in and relocate her once again.

On her way to her new identity, she's approached by a man who calls her by her real name. He is Jonathan Bovaro, the son of the murderer who changed Melody's family's life.

He promises not to hurt her, though he admits he has been sent by his father to finally kill her, as someone else in the family killed her parents.

But still, Melody chooses to go with Jonathan. Though she knows he could kill her at any moment, she feels, for the first time since she was 6, as though she is finally exercising some control over her life and her future.

Most of the book is as good as author David Cristofano's opening lines.

His characters are rich. While you pity Melody for the life she's had to lead, you also find yourself disliking her for the trouble she's caused others. While Jonathan is a murdering mobster, you find yourself liking him, wanting him to find his way.

The story is compelling and Cristofano's writing is eloquent. It's a page-turner, because you'll care about the characters enough to need to find out what happens to them.

In fact, Cristofano's ending leaves open the possibility for a sequel, and I, for one, would be very anxious to read the next chapter.

Laura L. Hutchison is an editor at The Free Lance-Star.