**UPDATED AUTHOR'S RELEASE** What’s in the heart of a hooker? Not the golden heart, but the same heart that beats in all of us. A woman who so violates the status quo that she has been legislated against and condemned by every generation, whether politics and society are in a morals and ethics phase or totally decadent.

These are women who have forsaken their rights. Libbe L.

Siskind was an abused and raped child, a prostitute, and a madam who became an entrepreneur. Her book describes much of the terrible reality of her adoption, foster care, sex trafficking and rapes, prostitution, and the system.

It goes in depth into an existence that should have killed her prior to reaching the age of twenty. The FBI opened a Pandora’s box in 2002, a federal sting to take down madams.

It made the papers, magazines, and TV news across the country. FBI agents were monitoring madams’ phone calls while Osama bin Laden and the Islamic terrorists of Al Qaeda were plotting to make their attack on September 11, 2001.

In New Orleans they initiated a case that involved 13 madams from 11 states and had a national focus. But the stories behind the accusations are personal.

They have, in most instances, a resonance that many straight” people respond to. The Room Beyond: The Thorns in Rose’s Garden is a book that has been researched and in the process for over 40 years.

Libbe L. Siskind, its subject and a defendant in the FBI case, has kept a low profile.

But now is the time to tell the whole movie-worthy story in a new, re-edited, and revised edition of her memoir. Often brutal and unnerving, it is also one of love, of subtle and clear triumph.

It is ultimately hopeful. .