The Daughter

Adult mystery 

     "I felt my way to her chest of drawers, and, pulling out a shirt, slipped the hot-water bottle inside.  I stepped carefully over to the bed, half tripping on strewn clothes.  My hands moved to turn the cover back around her, but it was smooth and flat."

     If you're the parent of a teen this is probably one of your worst nightmares.  It's nighttime 🌃.   You're waiting for your child to come home, maybe watching TV, browsing social media, or curled up with the family cat 🐈 😻 🐈‍⬛️ or dog 🐕 reading 📚.  You shut your eyes 👀 for a minute that turns into several hours.  You wake up and groggily glance at the clock.  You mentally thank your child for considerately tiptoeing around you on their way to bed.

     But you want to make sure they're safe.  You find yourself looking at an empty bed.  That's what jolts Jenny, protagonist of Jane Shemilt's The Daughter, into full on alert.

     Jenny has been living the good life in her comfortable home.  Although her schedule and husband Ted's don't always match up their two doctor marriage feels solid.  Her high school daughter and twin sons seem to be thriving.  She's even able to find time to spend in her studio painting.

     But one night 🌙 can change everything.  Suddenly police and media are swarming all over.  A search gets underway.  Police question everyone even tangentially connected with the family.

     Some ugly secrets come out into the open.  It seems that Jenny's family isn't as picture perfect as she imagined.  Her missing daughter, Naomi, supposedly still a virgin, is or was (depending on whether she's still alive) pregnant.  One of her sons has become addicted to drugs he stole from her.  Ted's alibi for the night of the disappearance turns out to be a lie...

     ...but at that point adultery seems pretty trifling compared to the possible murder of a beloved child.

     I found the narrative to be highly engaging.  And I'm not the only one.  On a library comment card seven out of eight readers gave it a nine or ten.

On a purrrsonal note, yesterday I went to a memorial service I could not believe.  If I didn't know better I might have mistaken it for an an old time revival service.  The minister kept talking about how we're all Sinners and can't save ourselves on our own merits so we'd better accept Christ as our savior before it's too late.  Then he prayed that the "bereaved family" would be moved (presumably by his words) to make the right decision.  I'd also been to services which were infomercials for salvation with the deceased depicted as unrecognizably pious and the pitch that if you were as holy you too could join them in Paradise.  Adam at five told me that a funeral was a chance to say goodbye to an old friend.  People want to remember a loved one as a fabulous but flawed human (not a plaster saint) and hear other people's memories.  They want to know that someone they loved was treasured by others.  Why do some clergy people seem to forget this?

Jules Hathaway 

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