Grace Francone believes in family above all. She works at her late husband’s pizza restaurant and is taising their 3 children. Ryan is about to graduate college and move to law school. Jack is in college, studying filmmaking, and Penny is still in high school.
But when Penny is accused of murder, Grace’s world threatens to come apart at the seams.
Penny is adopted. Grace had found her alone at the park when she was only 4. At that point, stranded in the rain, the little girl couldn’t speak or answer any questions. She couldn’t even say her name. Eventually the police found out that she was Isabella Boyd and was abandoned by her mother. Grace had felt a connection to her, so she fought to be the family who fostered her and later adopted her.
They were a happy family for many years. But when Penny started showing some odd behaviors, they took her to a therapist. Penny’s diagnosis: Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder, DID is extremely controversial. Many mental health professionals refuse to believe it exists, writing it off as a sociopath pretending to have several personalities to avoid taking responsibility.
Penny has demonstrated 3 alters—Eve, the dark protector who serves to shield Penny and the other alters from those who want to hurt her; Chloe, a compulsive perfectionist; and Ruby, who speaks with a British accent.
But it was Penny who was arrested, covered in blood, at the scene where Rachel Boyd, her birth mother, had been brutally stabbed to death.
As Penny works with a new doctor at the mental facility where she’s being kept, Grace works with an attorney she knows from the restaurant. Jack decides to make a film about Penny and her situation, and Ryan drops out of school to come home and run the restaurant. With the family pulling together, Grace is certain that they can figure out a way to show that Penny is innocent of the murder.
However, as the new doctor tries to find out Penny’s secrets, her dominant personality’s as well as her alters’ secrets—he comes across information that could change the entire defense strategy. Can they prove that Penny has DID, or will the jury think that she’s faking it to get away with murder?
D.J. Palmer’s The Perfect Daughter is a taut thriller about the intricacies of mental health and the defenses we come up with to protect ourselves from evil. There are the questions of who killed Rachel as well as the deeper dive into Penny and her alters. Does she really have separate personalities, or is she faking? Could she have killed her birth mother for abuse that happened before that day Grace found her on the playground? Or is she just a sociopath? Where does the truth lie?
I’ve been a fan of D.J. Palmer for years, but I have to say that The Perfect Daughter is my favorite Palmer book so far. I thought it was well written, with fascinating characters, and the story logic was strong. The story is told from Grace’s perspective, along with Penny’s doctor, and a first-person account from Jack in the diary he keeps for the film he plan on making. I liked the switch between the third-person and first-person storytelling, but I do wish more had been done with Jack’s diary and film. I felt like that was a missed opportunity in this story. But I still really liked The Perfect Daughter, and I’d recommend it to anyone who loves a good thriller or who is interested in learning more about Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Egalleys for The Perfect Daughter were provided by St. Martin’s Press through NetGalley, with many thanks.
