The Girl Who Ran Off with Daddy

By David Handler

A scandal-plagued author is killed in a mystery with “domestic repartee worthy of Nick and Nora Charles [and a] thoroughly entertaining cast of characters” (Publishers Weekly).
 Stewart Hoag has quit ghostwriting. Living in Connecticut with his ex-wife, Hoagy works on a novel and tends to Tracy, his brand-new daughter, who’s more beautiful than anything he’s ever written and only took nine months to make. Life is peaceful, until Thor Gibbs arrives to tear it apart. An unapologetically swaggering author, Thor is past seventy but still looks like the brash young man who befriended an aging Hemingway and inspired the first of the Beat poets. Once he was Hoagy’s mentor, but now he needs his help. Thor is in the middle of a tryst with his eighteen-year-old stepdaughter, and every newspaper, lawyer, and cop in the country wants him strung up from the highest tree. He hires Hoagy to help the beautiful young woman tell their side of the story. But trouble is following the controversial couple, and death is about to visit the cottage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Jun 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781453259740

David Handler

David Handler's first book in the Berger and Mitry series, The Cold Blue Blood, was a Dilys Award finalist and BookSense Top Ten pick. David is also the author of several novels about the witty and dapper celebrity ghostwriter Stewart Hoag and his faithful, neurotic basset hound, Lulu, including Edgar and American Mystery Award winner The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald. David lives in a two-hundred-year-old carriage house in Old Lyme, Connecticut.

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Reviews for The Girl Who Ran Off with Daddy

[vincentdarlage · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I was completely disappointed with this, both as a story and as an audiobook. I knew who the killer was going to be before the first corpse showed up (which is well into the second half of the book), and the characters were generally so over the top as to be unbelievable. I didn't buy into the murderer's motivation, and the dialogue between the murderer and the investigator at the end was amateurish and over-long.

The reading was terrible - the main character had no emotion, and everything the main character said and thought was in a terrible monotone, robbing the story of any humor. It was as though the reader thought this was some kind of film noir or perhaps he was channelling a bad Sgt. Joe Friday imitation.