Letters to my Daughter's Killer

Letters to my Daughter's Killer by Cath Staincliffe

Published by Constable

17th July 2014

Paperback Edition

Grandmother Ruth Sutton writes to the man she hates more than anyone else on the planet: the man who she believes killed her daughter Lizzie in a brutal attack four years earlier. Ruth's burden of grief and hatred, has only grown heavier with the passing of time, her avid desire for vengeance ever stronger. In writing to him Ruth hopes to exorcise the corrosive emotions that are destroying her life, to find the truth and with it release and a way forward. Whether she can ever truly forgive him is another matter - but the letters are her last, best hope.

Letters To My Daughter's Killer exposes the aftermath of violent crime for an ordinary family and explores fundamental questions of crime and punishment. How do we deal with the very human desire for revenge? If we get justice does reconciliation follow? Can we really forgive those who do us the gravest wrong? Could you?

This book is written though a series of letters and flashbacks to 2009 when Ruth Sutton's daughter is found beaten to death in her family home.  The police have no suspect or motive for her horrific death which has left a family in tatters.  We follow Ruth's attempts to deal with her loss through a series of letters written to the convicted killer of Lizzie four years later as she attempts to find some comfort and reasoning behind the death of her daughter.  Ruth knows who the killer is, we as the reader, do not.

As you get drawn into the story, you begin to question who the killer could be.  Is it someone that Lizzie knew, or a total stranger who entered her house that night when she was on her own, with her toddler Florence upstairs.  Did Florence see or hear anything?  Could she identify her mother's killer?  I love Cath Staincliffe's work as the author of the Scott & Bailey novels so I knew that this book will satisfy me as a lover of crime fiction.  I gasped when I found out who the killer was.  Will you when you read this too?

Happy Reading

Miss Chapter x