No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run – Tyler Wetherall

Tyler had lived in fifteen houses and five countries by the time she was nine. She didn’t think this was strange until Scotland Yard showed up in her bucolic English village, and she discovered her family had been living a lie. Her father was a fugitive and their family name was an alias.

They had been living in California back in 1983 when the Feds originally caught up with her dad; it was the same year Tyler was born. Her parents decided to go on the run with the three young children, and they spent the next few years traveling across Europe, assuming different identities, living in a series of beautiful places, from Portugal to Tuscany, paid for with drug money. Now her dad had fled once more, except this time he didn’t take her with him.

Despite the danger involved, for the following two years he flew Tyler and her siblings out to see him in secret wherever he was in hiding, until on her 12th birthday Scotland Yard followed Tyler to the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, where her father was eventually captured. It was over the summers spent visiting her dad in prison in California, as she grew into an increasingly self-destructive teenager, that he told her the truth about his criminal life. He had been a pot smuggler in the seventies, and his organization had bought in marijuana worth nearly a half billion dollars from Thailand.

In this emotionally detailed and carefully wrought memoir about growing up as a fugitive’s daughter, Tyler Wetherall pieces together the story of her parents’ past, which ultimately helps her understand her own.