The Good Daughter: The gripping new bestselling thriller from a No. 1 author
The stunning new standalone, with a chilling edge of psychological suspense, from No.1 bestselling author Karin Slaughter.The Good Daughter will have you hooked from the first page to the last, and will stay with you long after you have finished reading!One ran. One stayed. But who is…the good daughter?Twenty-eight years ago, Charlotte and Samantha Quinn's childhoods were destroyed by a terrifying attack on their family home. It left their mother dead. It left their father – a notorious defence attorney – devastated. And it left the family consumed by secrets from that shocking night.Twenty-eight years later, Charlie has followed in her father's footsteps to become a lawyer. But when violence comes to their home town again, the case triggers memories she's desperately tried to suppress. Because the shocking truth about the crime which destroyed her family won't stay buried for ever…
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Copyright © Karin Slaughter 2017
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 2018. Cover photographs © Stephen Carroll/Arcangel Images
Excerpt from letter “To A” – Flannery O’Connor
Copyright © 1979 by Regina O’Connor
Reprinted by permission of the Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust via Harold Matson Co., Inc. All rights reserved.
Dr Seuss quotation from an interview in the L.A. Times reproduced by kind permission of the Dr Seuss estate
Karin Slaughter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008150761
Ebook Edition © July 2017 ISBN: 9780008150785
Version: 2018-09-24
“… what you call my struggle to submit … is not struggle to submit but a struggle to accept and with passion. I mean, possibly, with joy. Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy—fully armed too as it’s a highly dangerous quest.”
–Flannery O’Connor
Contents
What Really Happened to Charlie
Cant’t wait for the next book from internationally-bestselling author Karin Slaughter?
Samantha Quinn felt the stinging of a thousand hornets inside her legs as she ran down the long, forlorn driveway toward the farmhouse. The sound of her sneakers slapping bare earth bongoed along with the rapid thumps of her heart. Sweat had turned her ponytail into a thick rope that whipped at her shoulders. The twigs of delicate bones inside her ankles felt ready to snap.
She ran harder, choking down the dry air, sprinting into the pain.
Up ahead, Charlotte stood in their mother’s shadow. They all stood in their mother’s shadow. Gamma Quinn was a towering figure: quick blue eyes, short dark hair, skin as pale as an envelope, and with a sharp tongue just as prone to inflicting tiny, painful cuts in inconvenient places. Even from a distance, Samantha could see the thin line of Gamma’s disapproving lips as she studied the stopwatch in her hand.
The ticking seconds echoed inside Samantha’s head. She pushed herself to run faster. The tendons cording through her legs sent out a high-pitched wail. The hornets moved into her lungs. The plastic baton felt slippery in her hand.
Twenty yards. Fifteen. Ten.
Charlotte locked into position, turning her body away from Samantha, looking straight ahead, then started to run. She blindly stretched her right arm back behind her, waiting for the snap of the baton into the palm of her hand so that she could run the next relay.
This was the blind pass. The handoff took trust and coordination, and just like every single time for the last hour, neither one of them was up to the challenge. Charlotte hesitated, glancing back. Samantha lurched forward. The plastic baton skidded up Charlotte’s wrist, following the red track of broken skin the same as it had twenty times before.
Charlotte screamed. Samantha stumbled. The baton dropped. Gamma let out a loud curse.
“That’s it for me.” Gamma tucked the stopwatch into the bib pocket of her overalls. She stomped toward the house, the soles of her bare feet red from the barren yard.
Charlotte rubbed her wrist. “Asshole.”
“Idiot.” Samantha tried to force air into her shaking lungs. “You’re not supposed to look back.”
“You’re not supposed to rip open my arm.”
“It’s called a blind pass, not a freak-out pass.”
The kitchen door slammed shut. They both looked up at the hundred-year-old farmhouse, which was a sprawling, higgledy-piggledy monument to the days before licensed architects and building permits. The setting sun did nothing to soften the awkward angles. Not much more than an obligatory slap of white paint had been applied over the years. Tired lace curtains hung in the streaked windows. The front door was bleached a driftwoody gray from over a century of North Georgia sunrises. There was a sag in the roofline, a physical manifestation of the weight that the house had to carry now that the Quinns had moved in.
