The Serial Killer's Daughter

'The Serial Killer's Daughter' is the second instalment into the anthology series by Alice Hunter, perfectly titled 'The Serial Killer's Family Series'. We are given a prologue where we are introduced to a little girl and we watch on as she dismembers a butterfly, quickly and efficiently, before letting the remaining parts fly away. A gust of wind blows her collection of insect parts from the table and she sighs in resignation, knowing that she will now have to dissect another butterfly. Like, don't you just absolutely hate when you're dismembering something/someone and their limbs are taken away so now you have to go back to dismembering more things/ones. It's so tiring, especially since it happens all the time.

I don't know whether Alice wants us to think that it is Jenny as a child and this is foreshadowing of something she is going to do, as it is common knowledge that animal mutilation has links to murderers/serial killers, or if she knows that we think that, and it is actually someone we are going to get introduced to later on. Well, with all these questions I think I just need to read further to get some of them solved, otherwise I am never going to find anything out. This memory is attributed to a blackout episode that Jenny has and we know it has happened to her before, but the memory is something that she isn't willing to even think about, as it sounds like something pretty bad happened the last time she blacked out.

This book is shown through 2 POVs which is one thing that makes me think that this book is leading up to Jenny being the one killing people. It would be pretty obvious, but if done well enough it can easily be justified, and work well. We are able to see things through Mark's perspective, who is Jenny's husband, which gives us a greater insight into her character. One thing that she mentioned was the missing wedding ring from her finger when she came too from her blackout, and it is also something that Mark mentions when he says that all hell broke loose the last time it happened.

As she is about to start driving their two kids to school she notices that there is a black binbag outside their house. She only buys white ones so she is a little confused, and when she opens it that confusion turns to disgust and shock as there is a dead cat inside. She is ready to cross it off as some weirdo who left it there for whatever reason, but when she sees a butterfly on the top, if we believe that the person at the start is her, then there is now a connection being formed between what happened to the cat and Jenny.

One thing that really stuck out to me was how short the chapters were, as they were sometimes going as low as 2 - 4 pages which is extremely small when talking about overall chapters, and the fact that they didn't go back and forth all the time. It means that Alice is allowed more flexibility and is also something that she did in the first instalment of this anthology series, so she has experience with this method. She is a part owner of a veterinarian practice, which is symbolism which ties into the fact that she has been known to kill animals in the past, so it is like the direct opposite thing.

Then there is a big reveal, in that the woman, Olivia Edwards, that Mark previously had an affair with, has gone missing. This happened on the same night that Jenny had her blackout and doesn't remember what happened, only that she came to in dirty clothes in the morning not knowing what happened before. It would be a crazy coincidence, although the setup is way too obvious for it to actually be a coincidence. In one of her previous books after her husband was having an affair with another woman, he is the one who kills her. So I know it isn't going to be the husband as that is way too easy to guess. If it isn't the husband or the wife then who could it actually be? The only thing that would make sense is if Alice is trying to throw us off the scent by making it seem too obvious that it might be the wife while she is blacked out, but she wasn't in fact blacked out and intentionally killed her, maybe as some kind of alternate personality? Or it could be someone from her past, as her father is obviously a serial killer.

Through every chapter, a little more is revealed. I'm not sure if I like this method of writing, where there are very small pieces of the overall story revealed in each chapter, and each chapter is also really short. It is something different and something I haven't seen much, but the overall feeling of the story leaves me feeling disconnected from the characters as I am not really able to get into their psyches or empathise with them and their situations because I don't really understand their situations.

When she was younger, Jenny was known as Jane before she found out who her father was. One thing I did notice was the constant use of 'she' to describe the person that ruined Jenny's life in the past. Yes, this could have easily been her mother, Claire, but there is something that sticks out to me about Alice not addressing the person by name that makes me think that it might be an alter ego of Jenny's, her childhood self, Jane. The reason she changed her whole identity might not have been because she was running from her mother, but because she was running from having murdered her mother. Or at least that is where my thoughts are starting to go so far.

One curious thing is that when Mark, seeing that policemen are going door to door to ask questions of the occupancy, has his blood run cold. Why would that happen unless he has something to hide? I'm not saying that he was the one who killed Olivia I think that would make so sense, but, from this reaction, he is hiding something and that something isn't trivial in the slightest.

Whoever is leaving the bin liners out is trying to frame Jenny. I'm not certain, but it really seems like that is what is happening as they at first left dead animals, which happened literally the night after Olivia died, and then more dead animals including the butterfly which has something to do with her past as Jane, as the daughter of a serial killer, and then after that, she finds that Olivia's bracelet has been left in one of the bin bag liners. Not only that, but her husband is starting to doubt what happened as the previous time that she blacked out at night, and he wasn't able to stop her from going where she wanted, he found her outside Olivia's house with a rock in her hand. Obviously, that would make anyone paranoid that their partner isn't who they say they are, but his doubt is another thing going into breaking her down mentally. Maybe this is her mother vying for revenge after being left alone, and she is trying to make all the people turn against her, including herself, before revealing her master plan when it is too late and she can't stop the punishment she is about to receive for a crime she did not commit.

We get small insights into her father's reasons for doing what he did, and how his crimes were committed as the book progresses. One thing that I found very intriguing was the reveal that the last victim of her fathers was someone who was having an affair. Someone who was having an affair eh, much like Mark was having an affair with Olivia. The style of writing is slowly starting to grow on me as while it isn't as anxiety-inducing (and after reading, 'Reminders of Him' by Colleen Hoover, I think I need that break badly) but it still has the want, need, craving for more information about what happened. And it is one of those books where if you just know how it ends it won't really feel that fun, or good as an ending, but if you read through the whole thing and get all the context, and the interpersonal relationships then you'll enjoy this book a lot more.

An actual shocking reveal is that the first person Paul, Jenny's father, attacked, when he was 10 years of age, was a young girl who had been making fun of him, while also unintentionally emulating his trauma with his mother (she was an escort) by taking boys and kissing them, was a woman called Claire. A woman who, 15 years later, would go on to marry Paul and birth his child Jenny.

The snippets that seemed like they were from a book beforehand are actually from someone who seems to have a stake with something to do with Paul. They say that they're doing this out of love which pushes me towards certain people but every time I try and piece together whether it is actually plausible that those people would be doing this I am brought back to reality as their motives don't make sense, or haven't been explained yet. I do think that the person who is trying to frame Jen is probably also the person writing about Paul, and meeting with him. Maybe one of the victim's family members? Or maybe Paul accidentally ended up uncovering something massive in that implicated Jen as Jane of hurting people. Who knows yet though.

All I do know is that I am seething that Alice thought it was a good idea to include a scene where she is willing to tell Mark, but then when the police come and are a bit more intrusive than expected she clams up again and doesn't want to tell him. I just know that this is probably going to bite her in the butt later on and be the cause of her downfall if a downfall does occur for her.

One person that I suspect, and probably wrongly as it really makes no logical sense, is Ella, their daughter. Mark mentions her going out a lot at night, which she knows she hasn't been doing, Ella has been very standoffish and wants to avoid her mother seeing something so says she doesn't want her to go to school with her, and to just drop her off at the gate. Yes, she most likely didn't have anything to do with Olivia disappearing as she is a young kid, but as we know from Paul's story a child is perfectly capable of hurting someone and feeling good for doing that. Additionally, the constant mention of having a serial killer's blood could mean that maybe it skipped one step and is in her daughter instead of her, and she hasn't noticed it because she is too focused on herself and her husband. It is definitely my wildest theory about this book, and probably my wildest ever, but it does fit with some of the things, just not other parts that are crucial to making it all tie together. At least not yet. She does find CCTV of her own car arriving at a time she found no evidence she had left the house or even saw herself on the cameras, just the car while deleting other footage of herself and deleting that footage. This is an absolutely horrible mistake as although she looked a bit guilty she could explain what was going on to the policemen and then go from there, but with the footage missing, and the fact that deleted footage can be recovered, things aren't looking good for her now. Especially since Mark has just found Olivia's bracelet that was stored in the floorboards after she found it outside their house.

One thing that I think could be a pretty interesting twist is if the person interviewing and trying to get information from Paul is Jenny, his own daughter. She mentioned she was a woman earlier, which is how I know that this is even a possibility. Yes, I haven't figured out the reason for this, but if executed well could be a really nice twist, and maybe could have something to do with her learning how to kill people properly and get away with it. Mark then takes the letter and the bracelet to the police, having been feeling guilty over something that happened with one of his previous girlfriends where he didn't step up ad she got hurt, and Jenny is taken in for questioning and later arrested, but released on bail shortly after. She realises that this person is copying the killings of her father, something I had mentioned before, and we do know that this person is around right now as they are talking about Jenny, and about how she didn't appreciate the 'love' her father was giving her. One person I do suspect a bit is Abi. She not only mentioned how similar she and Jenny were, but the person visiting Paul was an attractive young woman and her calculating, observant, nature, which was something Jenny picked up on, later on, are things that link these two people together. Although there is one theory that I am thinking, and that would be pretty amazing but also horrifying, and that is if the real young, attractive woman who was going to visit Paul, and who set this whole thing up, including getting her to have a motive because she had an affair with her husband, is Olivia.

And yes, the reveal is great and the person wasn't actually Olivia, it wasn't Mark, it wasn't Jenny, but it was someone who I had suspected previously, Jamie. Actually, you won't know her by that name, you'll know her by the name, Abi, with Jamie being her real name, and her mother being Claire, Jenny's mother. They are half sisters and you can understand the resentment that built up over Jenny being someone that Claire continued to focus on, leaving Jamie to be neglected by her mother and instead of blaming the person that deserves it, she wanted to blame everyone else as well, and that included the object of Claire's obsession, Jenny. Everything gets sorted and Mark and Jenny's relationship is more than over as while she might have been able to come back from his cheating, him keeping her kids away from her and giving her to the police without even talking to her is just something that I don't think anyone would be able to get over.

I had thought that the scene at the start of the book had been Jenny, and that was a hint to us that she was going down some of the same routes as Paul, but after the last scene in the book where we are able to see who it really was that was slowly picking apart butterflies and destroying them to make them special, which is why I had never doubted it to be Jenny as that was something her father used to say, but the reveal at the end shows that this is happening in real-time and that my previous assessment that something was wrong with Ella had been correct as she is the one mutilating butterflies. She is the one who has, on her own, started to think an awful lot like Paul and it is like I said, with psychopathy, it happens when your brain isn't working correctly and that you're getting reduced signals between two parts that are conductive and vital to having empathy, fear, sentimentality etc. and yes, you're right in that we don't know if there is a hereditary link in psychopathy, it doesn't seem like that much of a farfetched suggestion to assume that diminishing communications between certain parts of the brain can be carried over through DNA into a child. But the difference between her father and Ella is that her daughter has a whole support system, while her father was left and neglected severely by his mother.

Overall I liked it, and I did think that the writing style ended up growing on me somewhat. I did end up liking this more than her first instalment into this anthological series and even though there were parts I disliked, such as how some hints could be perceived in a lot of different ways. It wasn't in a way where you could just only get it if you got everything else, it was left in an open way that literally could mean a lot of different things. Hints like that don't really add much to the book as they just make more confusion and can leave the reader feeling unsatisfied with the ending, although that wasn't exactly the case here (I do think it brought it down a little as one of the most fun things, as you can probably see from my constant, outlandish guesses, is to try and guess who the killer is and finding it out beforehand, while it might seem anti-climatic, doesn't take anything away from the book and finding out everything surrounding that is what makes the book fun in the end). An example of this being done well is in this book as well as with Abi, there were clear hints towards her being related to Jenny, with all the reference to her mother, and how it was really the only thing that had in common. It was cleverly done and I just wish all the reveals and mysteries were done like that.

8.1/10