Review: The Serial Killer’s Daughter (The Serial Killer's Family #2) by Alice Hunter

               

Print Length: 400 pages

Publisher:  AVON Books UK (July 21, 2022)

From Goodreads.com: Is murder in the blood?

In a sleepy Devon village, a young girl is taken from the streets. Local vet, Jenny, is horrified. This kind of thing doesn’t happen here.

But it’s not the first time she’s been so close to a crime scene. The daughter of a prolific serial killer, she’s spent her whole life running from who she really is.

And the crime is harrowingly similar to those her father committed all those years ago…

But she’s not her father’s daughter.

Is she?

                                                         *******************

My Rating: 1 star out of 5

I had read The Serial Killer's Wife back in the spring of 2021 and while I openly admitted that it was not for me, I did promise to give the author another chance. Added to that I'm a sucker for a well done serial killer in the family novel. 

Which this sadly was not (at least for me). 

Let me start off by saying that you DO NOT have to have read The Serial Killer's Wife in order for this one to make sense as it would appear that the two books are not connected in any way. This is not a sequel to that book where the child is all grown up, this is merely the story of another person (this time the daughter) who has the misfortune of having a serial killer for a family member. 

There were a few issues I had with this one, the first being Jenny's paranoia and constant blackouts. I get it. These are real issues that real people have to deal with, but this was just so constant and over the top that I quickly became bored. Perhaps instead of trying (and obviously failing) to deal with them on her own, Jenny should have sought help. She definitely made a lot of stupid mistakes throughout this novel (the biggest of which is hiding a crucial piece of evidence in the disappearance of Olivia inside of her own house nonetheless). Her husband Mark is just as bad harboring his own secrets, but of course instead of actually TALKING to his wife about various issues, he chooses to bury his head in the sand and avoid confrontation for most of the story, just to jump to the complete wrong conclusions when he does decide to finally do something. 

Most of the background characters are also somewhat shady, which while it does provide the perfect red herrings for who is possibly responsible for what is going on (if it's not Jenny herself), it became tedious after awhile. Having one or two characters potentially up to something is one thing, but every single person you come across (aside from Mark and Jenny's two children of course, although I will touch more on that later). 

The plot itself sort of plods along. At no point did I feel particularly glued to the pages, nor did I feel like this was the thriller it had promised to be. It was all sort of boring actually. Even the big reveal at the end was more of a what the heck moment than an oh heck moment. This could be in part due to the fact that I was never quite sure how old Jenny was supposed to be. I knew she had left home for university, and has been gone from her mother's house for 20 years (or longer), and married for around 11 years, which made the reveal kind of weird... without giving spoilers I can't really go into detail, just that it didn't make sense to me how it could have happened. 

The final nail in the coffin for me was the absolutely unnecessary epilogue in which one of Jenny's children cruelly pulls the wings from a butterfly only to smash the poor thing into the table. This was supposedly to cause Jenny to wonder if the "serial killer gene" skipped a generation to "infect" her child, but due to the fact that there was a lot of talk about animal mutilations in this book just leads me to seriously wonder about the author herself. 

DISCLAIMER: I received a complimentary copy of this novel from the publisher. This has not affected my review in any way. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are 100% my own.

                                                         *******************

                                               

                                 The Serial Killer’s Daughter is available on Amazon.com