Maren Longbella, The Minnesota Star Tribune

Who hasn’t dreamed of chucking it all, assuming a new identity and starting over?

Karen Palmer didn’t dream it, she lived it, except her experience — or at least the impetus of it — was a nightmare she writes about in her memoir “She’s Under Here.”

In 1989, Palmer, her new husband and two daughters from a previous marriage entered what she refers to as a “do-it-yourself witness protection program.” They sold most of their belongings, left behind whatever they couldn’t pack up, and fled: “Driving east out of California, we decided on our new names … Hidden under the driver’s seat was a guidebook on how to create new identities, but it couldn’t tell us who we’d be ."

It was that “previous marriage” that propelled the family to leave everythin

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