Disclaimer: I received this ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
The Murderer’s Daughter (3.5 stars) is an enjoyable, well-plotted thriller fronted by an intelligent protagonist named Grace Blades. It’s structured so that we learn about her backstory concurrently while she’s solving a murder and, in fact, protecting herself, since she is connected to the victim.
Grace, we learn, was born into a dirt-poor, abusive family, and one of her parents ends up murdering the other. Grace is bounced around in foster care for awhile, before eventually ending up in a more stable situation where her home education is overseen by a clinical psychologist who meets with her and discovers her highly gifted aptitude for learning. Before long, she’s above her grade and age level in just about every subject, and the influence of her psychologist mentor inspires her to go into the same field.
Adult Grace, like her younger self, is not a very sociable woman, though the combination of her academic and emotional intelligence makes her very popular and successful with her patients. She particularly specializes in working with people who have experienced intimate violence, especially violence in the immediate family. One day, a man comes to see her, obviously struggling with demons, but he is unable to actually share with Grace what is troubling him, choosing instead to exit the session. After he winds up dead and Grace starts noticing that she is being followed on the road, she suspects that whomever killed him thinks that she knows whatever secret her patient died for. So Grace begins her own investigation out of curiosity and self defense.
This book is a very straightforward thriller that manages to be entertaining despite some narrative shortcuts that end up making many clues and conclusions a bit too easy for the protagonist. For instance, we learn that Grace at some point trains with a self defense instructor, and without much further explanation, she basically operates at 00-level espionage techniques. The story also treats Grace’s intelligence as a get-out-of-jail-free card: we’re beaten over the head with how smart she is in her backstory (e.g. any time she speaks plainly to an adult, telling it how she sees it, they seem to blink with surprise and tell her how sharp she is.) As an adult, she often connects dots that aren’t really there on the page for a reader, and we’re just meant to go “Okay, well Grace is a genius and she figured it out so I’ll take her word for it.”
Suspend your disbelief a bit and accept some exaggerations as true, and this makes a good, quick summer read.
