An excellent heartwarming book-a true story that I never was aware of. Lois Duncan put her personal feelings aside and wrote a worthy story of her own daughter's murder. ( )

This one is really hard to review. I don't know how to critique it without giving away the ending. Let's just say that I found the ending disappointing, I had issues with the whole "psychic" aspect, and I didn't connect with the author because she just seemed too objective. I know the whole objectivity thing comes from being an author, but for me, if I lost a child I would be a basketcase. For years. And I know that everyone grieves differently, but that just led to a disconnect for me. Anyone who wants to read this ... I'm putting it back on BookMooch. ( )

After her 18 year old daughter is shot while leaving a friend's house, teen author Lois Duncan begins a desperate search for answers about her death. Kaitlyn Arquette, a bright and vivacious 18 year old, is shot twice while driving late at night in Albuquerque. At first, her shocked family rallies around her life in boyfriend a young Vietnamese man. However, as the boyfriend's shady , criminal activities come to light, Duncan begins to investigate on her own. This search includes consultations with a number of psychics, which leads Duncan into an examination of her own paranormal abilities and past lives.

This book is interesting, but probably not in the ways that Duncan intented. First off, Lois Duncan was not the right person to write this book. Her perspective is hopelessly skewed as the mother of the victim, which gives an unbalanced view of events, and sadly, she seems not to have gained any catharsis from writing it. Duncan seems to hold her daughter completely blameless in her own death, only cursing Kait's guilelessness. However, if Duncan's theory of the death is correct, that her daughter was involved with insurance scams/drug smuggling/Asian street gangs; then Kaitlyn was either involved or too sheltered, too willful or too something to notice the warning signs.

What is interesting about this book is Duncan's need to create meaning, both in the meandering and often contradictory readings of various psychics, and as actual facts are revealed about the case. Also interesting is her jaundiced view of the Albuquerque police department, who, while not blameless in the lack of action on Kaitlin's murder, are not the villainous bureaucracy that Duncan paints them as.

All in all an interesting, if difficult to read and frustrating book. (cross-posted from MeriJenBen) ( )

It is terrifying what grief and suffering can do to people.

This is the true story of talented young adult writer Lois Duncan. The woman is a prolific and gifted poet and author, and has been financially successful in a cut-throat business. She is warm, gracious, friendly, and a real class act. But when one of her children was murdered, Lois became a devout believer in communication with the "other world". Her book, Who Killed My Daughter? is the rather incoherent tale of her contacts with various spiritualists and mediums who she believes gave her the vital clues necessary to solve her daughter's murder. The "clues" these mediums gave Ms. Duncan are so vague as to mean practically anything -- and even a cursory reading of the book shows the reader that it was really Lois' own determined investigation of her daughter's rather problematic life and risky choices that ended up pointing to the reasons her daughter was targeted for death.

But Ms. Duncan falls into the common trap of believing that if only she repeats something often enough, and emphatically enough, her audience will take it as an established fact, as she desperately needs these mediums' "communications" with her dead daughter to be. She admits in the book that she was on the verge of a complete breakdown after her daughter's untimely death, and as a mother myself I can totally sympathize with her distress. What must be worse for her is that her discovery that she knew very little about her daughter's activities during that last, fateful year. So it makes sense on a human level that Lois was desperate enough to clutch onto any straw that would both assuage her guilt and allow her to convince herself that she and her daughter could reunite, if only temporarily, to find the girl's killer.

It's a sad book, but made even sadder by Ms. Duncan's complete inability to see how it was her own determination and detective skills that allowed her to put the pieces of the puzzle together, not some fragmentary phrases from the dead.

The book is well worth reading, though, just to see how even the most brilliant and talented among us can be seduced by despair into believing the most bizarre ideas. ( )

After her 18 year old daughter is shot while leaving a friend's house, teen author Lois Duncan begins a desperate search for answers about her death. Kaitlyn Arquette, a bright and vivacious 18 year old, is shot twice while driving late at night in Albuquerque. At first, her shocked family rallies around her life in boyfriend a young Vietnamese man. However, as the boyfriend's shady , criminal activities come to light, Duncan begins to investigate on her own. This search includes consultations with a number of psychics, which leads Duncan into an examination of her own paranormal abilities and past lives.

This book is interesting, but probably not in the ways that Duncan intented. First off, Lois Duncan was not the right person to write this book. Her perspective is hopelessly skewed as the mother of the victim, which gives an unbalanced view of events, and sadly, she seems not to have gained any catharsis from writing it. Duncan seems to hold her daughter completely blameless in her own death, only cursing Kait's guilelessness. However, if Duncan's theory of the death is correct, that her daughter was involved with insurance scams/drug smuggling/Asian street gangs; then Kaitlyn was either involved or too sheltered, too willful or too something to notice the warning signs.

What is interesting about this book is Duncan's need to create meaning, both in the meandering and often contradictory readings of various psychics, and as actual facts are revealed about the case. Also interesting is her jaundiced view of the Albuquerque police department, who, while not blameless in the lack of action on Kaitlin's murder, are not the villainous bureaucracy that Duncan paints them as.

All in all an interesting, if difficult to read and frustrating book. ( )