Dear Daughter
A Novel
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3.7 • 224 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
• Winner of the Strand Critics Award for Best First Novel • Nominated for the Barry and Macavity Awards for Best First Novel • Longlisted for the CWA John Creasy (New Blood) Dagger Award
“Quick-witted and fast-paced, this debut mystery should be a hit with Gone Girl fans.” —People magazine
"This is an all-nighter . . . The best debut mystery I've read in a long time."—Tana French
“A really gutsy, clever, energetic read, often unexpected, always entertaining. I loved Janie Jenkins’s sassy voice and Elizabeth Little’s too. In the world of crime novels, Dear Daughter is a breath of fresh air.” —Kate Atkinson, New York Times bestselling author of Life After Life
A sensational debut thriller featuring an unforgettable heroine who just might have murdered her mother
Former “It Girl” Janie Jenkins is sly, stunning, and fresh out of prison. Ten years ago, at the height of her fame, she was incarcerated for the murder of her mother, a high-society beauty known for her good works and rich husbands. Now, released on a technicality, Janie makes herself over and goes undercover, determined to chase down the one lead she has on her mother’s killer. The only problem? Janie doesn’t know if she’s the killer she’s looking for.
Janie makes her way to an isolated South Dakota town whose mysteries rival her own. Enlisting the help of some new friends (and the town’s wary police chief), Janie follows a series of clues—an old photograph, an abandoned house, a forgotten diary—and begins to piece together her mother’s seemingly improbable connection to the town. When new evidence from Janie’s own past surfaces, she’s forced to consider the possibility that she and her mother were more alike than either of them would ever have imagined.
As she digs tantalizingly deeper, and as suspicious locals begin to see through her increasingly fragile facade, Janie discovers that even the sleepiest towns hide sinister secrets—and will stop at nothing to guard them. On the run from the press, the police, and maybe even a murderer, Janie must choose between the anonymity she craves and the truth she so desperately needs.
A gripping, electrifying debut novel with an ingenious and like-it-or-not sexy protagonist, Dear Daughter follows every twist and turn as Janie unravels the mystery of what happened the night her mother died—whatever the cost.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jane Jenkins, the heroine of Little's assured fiction debut, single-mindedly pursues one goal when she's released from a California women's prison. After serving 10 years of her sentence for the 2003 murder of her mother, socialite and philanthropist Marion Elsinger, she wants desperately to find out if she was indeed the culprit. Public opinion, led by the media and including crime blogger Trace Kessler, strongly leans toward belief in her guilt. Armed with a false persona, Jane disappears from the public eye and even her lawyer's protection to follow the slimmest of leads into her secretive, tempestuous mother's mysterious past in tiny, decaying Adeline, S.Dak., and its mirror community of Ardelle. Little (Trip of the Tongue: Cross-Country Travels in Search of America's Languages) effectively intersperses outside perspective in the form of emails, text messages, and other communications in Jane's entertainingly caustic first-person narrative (e.g., "Multi-tools are like insults, girls you should always have one on hand").
Customer Reviews
See AllJust okay
I originally got the book because it was compared to Gone Girl; however it is nothing like that book. I could never really get into the plot or characters. The ending was a let down
Dear daughter
Liked the book all the through. The ending killed it for me. Horrible ending. Left me feeling totally disgusted that I wasted my time!
Dear Daughter
Worst ending ever! The story was interesting until the disappointing & totally implausible conclusion.