Fifteen years ago, Lilith Wade was arrested for the brutal murder of six women. After a death row conviction, media frenzy, and the release of an unauthorized biography, her thirty-year-old daughter Edie Beckett is just trying to survive out of the spotlight. She’s a recovering alcoholic with a dead-end city job and an unhealthy codependent relationship with her brother.

Edie also has a disturbing secret: a growing obsession with the families of Lilith’s victims. She’s desperate to see how they’ve managed—or failed—to move on. While her escalating fixation is a problem, she’s careful to keep her distance. That is, until she crosses a line and a man is found murdered.

Edie quickly becomes the prime suspect—and while she can’t remember everything that happened the night of the murder, she’d surely remember killing someone. With the detective who arrested her mother hot on her trail, Edie goes into hiding. She’s must get to the truth of what happened that night before the police—or the real killer—find her.

Unless, of course, she has more in common with her mother than she’s willing to admit…

Book Type:

Suspense

Review: In Her Bones

The daughter of a convicted serial killer fears she’s becoming like her mother when a fixation spirals out of control, landing her front and center in a murder investigation.

With IN HER BONES, Kate Moretti (THE VANISHING YEAR, THE BLACKBIRD SEASON) is back with a compelling suspense that explores the ties that bind those who are left behind in the wake of a violent crime. The victims’ family members, the children of the criminal, those most intimately involved with the case—their lives are forever entwined after one woman’s rage propels her to brutally murder six women.

It’s been fifteen years since Lilith Wade was famously convicted and put on death row, but her daughter, Edie Beckett, still struggles to survive, trying to live outside her mother’s shadow and away from the media’s spotlight. She’s a recovering alcoholic with a city job and a fixation with those affected by her mother’s murders. Specifically, the families of the victims whose lives were irrevocably sundered by Lilith’s knife.

Edie is smart, really smart, and can hack her way to find the answers she seeks. How are they? Have they moved on? What are their lives like now?

Perhaps no one can really understand what her life (and the life of her older brother) has been like more than them. Her obsession, although intense, has always been kept at a distance, until one day, she goes too far.

Shortly after, Edie finds herself on the run, her cleverness and a mind full of muddied memories her only tools to find the truth of what happened on the night that made her a suspect. And the more she digs, the more it leads back to her past, to her mother.

Moretti’s tale unravels primarily from Edie’s perspective, but also from Detective Brandt’s, as well as through excerpts from a book on her mother. Through that narrative, we better understand Edie’s childhood and the neglect she and her brother endured. We learn about the crimes and the victims, and how these murders and the media frenzy surrounding them, affected and bound those who remain.

It’s a story that’s both fascinating and frightening, insightful and engrossing. Moretti deftly explores themes of obsession, resilience, nature vs. nurture and the often toxic ties that bind. It was a riveting thriller, beginning to end.

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