The Victim's Daughter - Softcover

Wilson, Robley

3.22

9 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553402536 ISBN 13: 9780553402537

Publisher: Transworld Publishers Ltd, 1993

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The first novel by the author of the short-story collection, "Terrible Kisses". Lisa Cooper eagerly awaits her trip back home accompanied by her daughter, to attend a high-school class reunion and pay a visit to her father. But her happiness is shattered when she finds her father beaten to death.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

From poet and short-story writer Wilson (Dancing for Men; Living Alone; Terrible Kisses), a first novel that tries for psychological depth but, in this longer form, lingers on the shoals of formula instead. As luck would have it, Melissa Allen's divorced father is murdered in his house on the very night that Melissa comes home for her 15th high-school reunion in the small town of Scoggin, Maine-- to discover her father, in his study, with his skull caved in. This isn't Melissa's first acquaintance with violence and blood. At age 15, she had an abortion (to her it was murder); her own husband, a deranged Vietnam vet, became a particularly grisly suicide; and now she is witness to her father's brutally spilled blood. What Melissa doesn't know is that her parents divorced because her father came out of the closet, or that her father since then has been entertaining young schoolboys regularly in his bedroom. Was he murdered, then, by the ex-boxer and ne'er-do-well the local cops want to pin the crime on, with a motive of robbery; or was he in fact murdered by the morally outraged father of one of the seduced and sodomized boys--by the same man (now a doctor) who got Melissa pregnant back when she was 15, whose own wife is recently dead of cancer, and in whose bed Melissa now picks things up more or less where they were left off years before? Moral complexities and overtones are bullied aside as Melissa pinballs between the rather staged and public-issue-drenched symmetries of her past and her present. Meanwhile, sent from the state attorney general's office to help investigate the murder is the divorced, world-weary, heavy- smoking Inspector Willard Strand, whose 60-year-old heart is awakened to new possibilities by his willing and bright assistant, the blond, fit, shapely 38-year-old Eleanor. In all, small-town melodrama on an occasionally vivid but generally hyper-familiar stage. -- Copyright �1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Short story writer Wilson ( Living Alone ) explores the dark side of small-town life in this tale of a murder and its cause. Lissa Allen returns to Maine for her 15th high school reunion only to discover her father lying in his study, murdered. Local police authorities want to hush up part of the story--that Melissa's father, Raymond Cooper, seduced teenage boys. However, investigators from the state attorney general's office, Willard Strand and Eleanor Watkins, are willing to expose the truth of Cooper's life to find his murderer. Through the course of the investigation, as curmudgeonly Strand falls in love with his young assistant, Lissa struggles with her father's death. Her pain is amplified by memories of her husband's suicide several years before and of a high school abortion. Trying to help her through this traumatic time is an old high school friend--who wants to be more. But her heart is won by the man who made her pregnant, now a widowed doctor, although his role in her father's murder is under question. Superficial insights into complex emotional issues and a narrative complicated by too many threads diminish the promise of this first novel.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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