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The Lost Night: A Daughter's Search for the Truth of Her Father's Murder

About the Book

The Lost Night: A Daughter's Search for the Truth of Her Father's Murder

"At about three thirty a.m. on June 22, 1986, someone entered, through an unlocked sliding-glass door, my father's house on the outskirts of the central California farming town where he had grown up.  The intruder took a knife from the kitchen and stabbed my father as he lay sleeping next to his third wife." 

So begins Rachel Howard's memoir about her father's unsolved murder, which happened when she was just ten years old.  But from the start The Lost Night is about something much deeper and more complex than justice.  Writing more than 15 years after her father's bizarre death, Rachel is not out to nab a killer, but to make peace with the unfathomable.  The result of her riveting quest is a stunningly universal exploration of grief that turns the genre of true crime upside down.

Set in California's agricultural Central Valley --- an arid land of fertilizer and strip-malls vividly evoked in Howard's unsentimental prose --- The Lost Night is a richly woven exploration of memory and reconciliation. Stan Howard was a laid-back, handsome man who loved the music of Rod Stewart and seemed to have no enemies. His sudden and unexplained death left Rachel and her grandparents in shock, ill-equipped to talk about his murder and nearly estranged after years of silence.  Rachel goes to live with her mother and her drug-addicted, abusive stepfather.  In the days after the murder, she is taken to a psychiatrist but refuses to speak.  For years she attempts to "pretend as though the murder never happened," shaking off horrifying nightmares, salving her sense of abandonment with late-night sexual trysts, and burying any remembrance of her father.

It isn't until Rachel is embarking on adulthood that she begins to face the reality of her father's murder, eventually seeking the only two other people present at the scene of his death: Her father's third wife, long an object of family suspicion, and her former stepbrother.  Their revelations throw Rachel's theories of her father's death into chaos.  Reconnecting with her father's parents, she learns that truth --- and resolution --- are to be found in the delicate workings of memory, not in some detective's dusty case book.

In a culture saturated with who-dunnits and murder mysteries, The Lost Night is a rare look at the deeper emotional aftermath of murder and grief, an experience that touches more lives than most Americans would like to believe.  Compassionate and engrossing, The Lost Night shows us a side of murder seldom glimpsed.

The Lost Night: A Daughter's Search for the Truth of Her Father's Murder
by Rachel Howard

  • Publication Date: June 27, 2006
  • Mass Market Paperback: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Plume
  • ISBN-10: 0452287421
  • ISBN-13: 9780452287426