After Her : A Novel
Author(s): Joyce Maynard
Summer, 1979. A hot, Northern California school vacation stretches before Rachel and her younger sister Patty—the daughters of a larger-than-life, irresistibly handsome detective father and the mother whose heart he broke.
Left to their own devices, the sisters spend their days studying record jackets, concocting elaborate fantasies about a mysterious neighbor, and playing dangerous games on the mountain that looms behind their house.
When young women start turning up dead on the mountain, the girls' father is put in charge of finding the murderer. Watching her father's life slowly unravel as months pass and more women are killed, Rachel embarks on her most dangerous game yet . . . using herself as bait to catch the killer. But, rather than cracking the case, the consequences of Rachel's actions will destroy her father's career and alter forever the lives of everyone she loves.
Thirty years later, still haunted by the belief that the killer remains at large, Rachel constructs a new strategy to smoke out the Sunset Strangler and vindicate her father—a plan that unexpectedly unearths a long-buried family secret.
Review(s):
“[Maynard] weav(es) a knotty tale of family secrets, told in the alternating voices of her likable main characters.”
“The Good Daughters shows Maynard’s strengths once again—particularly in vivid descriptions of farm life, geographies, and relationships of all kinds. Passions and psychological changes in a character over time ring most true.”
“Absorbing.”
“An evocative story . . . [Maynard] consistently brings emotional authenticity to the long arc of her characters’ lives and to the joy and loss they experience. A profoundly moving chronicle of the primacy of family connection.”
“An impressive writer...with a fine sense of time, of place, of humor.”
“Exquisite . . . . [A] beautifully written book.”
“In addition to being a beautiful and engaging story, Maynard deftly captures Dana’s struggle to come to terms with her sexuality in the midst of her family’s instability. And her relationship with Clarice is one of the strongest in the novel. Highly recommended. ”
“Maynard is a clever storyteller.”
“Maynard’s spare prose packs a rich emotional punch...a can’t put-it-down mystery.”
“Vividly rendered.”
ISBN: 9780062257420