The Rules of Survival
Nancy Werlin
 The book starts out with an introduction when Matthew Walsh is writing a letter to his younger sister Emmy to tell her the story of their mother's vicious abuse. The True story sister, Callie. Callie is eleven, Matthew is thirteen, and Emmy is a toddler. Callie and Matthew go to the Cumberland Farms store to get Popsicles, because there is a heat wave. They see Murdoch, who protects a kid from being openly abused. Matthew and Callie like Murdoch, and both of them want to track him down so that they can be his friend. Meanwhile, the first act of abuse that is shown in the book comes when Nikki hits Matthew with a bag of clams after Nikki finds the address of Murdoch that Callie found on the Internet. Nikki begins to date Murdoch, but eventually they break stalking him. Nikki is angry and sends a man called Rob to brutalize Murdoch. Nikki and Rob eventually end up in jail. After she gets out of jail, she recklessly drives in search of Murdoch. Instead, she finds pleasure in tormenting Julie, a friend of Murdoch. Julie loses the use of her legs, and Nikki ends up in jail again. Ben, Matthew's father (who is scared of Nikki), and Bobbie, Nikki's sister, use this . Things are fine for a while until Nikki kidnaps Emmy and gets her drunk, although she is from Emmy and she tells him where she is. Matthew rescues Emmy, only to run into Nikki who greets Matt with a joke involving which alcohol Emmy Nikki unconscious and contemplates killing her when Murdoch appears. After coming to Murdoch advises Nikki to run away and never come back. But this and the fact no one has seen her in not the end of Nikki. Letters continue to come. Some of them are normal, but some contain threatening messages like "I will kill you" or "It was Murdoch's fault." The book ends with Murdoch telling Matt that he was also abused when he was younger leading to him killing his father. Mathew thanks Murdoch for stopping him. In the end, Matt never gives the letter to Emmy stating that it wasn't really for her it was for him.