The Murderer's Daughter

The prolific Jonathan Kellerman has written The Murderer’s Daughter, a non- Alex Delaware book, introducing a new character, a new clinical psychologist, Grace Blades, Ph.D. Grace was the birth product of the worst of characters. Her 22-year-old father was a polysubstance abuser and general worthless lowlife, and her 19-year-old mother was no better. They met at Flapper-Jack’s Pancake Palace where they were the nighttime cleanup crew, in Antelope Valley, an economically depressed desert area north of LA. Grace may have been conceived on the second night of their acquaintance. Given the lack of interest that both parents had in her welfare, it’s remarkable that Grace survived her first five years, but by then, she had learned how to fend for herself. She had no emotional attachment to either her parents of whom she thought of as the strangers who happened to share her rattrap residence in a disgusting trailer park.

Grace was kicked into the foster care system when her mom murdered her father, when in the midst of another argument and episode of spousal abuse, her mom slit her father’s throat. Then, using the same knife, mom plunged it into her own belly, thus successfully committing suicide. All Grace saw was blood, and she vividly remembered “the red room.” Over the next several years, she was bounced around from one foster house to another because foster parents got paid more for taking care of special needs kids, which Grace was not, so when a foster parent had a chance to make more money, Grace got the boot to the next home. It was not until Grace’s teenage years that she landed in a more stable and helpful foster setting. She was a remarkably intelligent and resourceful person who met enough people to help her along the way so she did not end up like her parents.

In the telling of this story, Kellerman bounced forward to Grace’s current life in LA as a successful psychologist who specialized in dealing with trauma victims in her own private practice, and then back to her developing life as a ward of the courts. However, despite her ability to help other trauma victims, Grace remained scarred in terms of her ability form intimate relationships with her peers. For the most part, she was a loner who learned to satisfy her sexual needs by seducing random men for one-night stands. Mostly, that worked out for her, but a time that it did not is an integral part of the story. Her past came back to haunt her when she stumbled into some of the people she had known during her foster care days who were even more emotionally damaged.

The story did not reach a resolution until the last couple of pages. It kept me involved and curious to the very end. Kellerman is a master storyteller, and he has the option of doing so much with this character in future stories. If he does, I’ll be along for the ride. BTW, this is a prepublication review, and the book should be available shortly.