DEAR DAUGHTER

The novel follows Janie Jenkins as she tries to find out the truth of who really murdered her mother--after she was convicted of the murder and then let out of prison ten years later on a technicality. The voice is young and contemporary with a lot of energy and sass, and the story captures the opulence of Beverly Hills and the rural small towns of the South Dakota Black Hills.

Acerbic, too smart for her own good, and fresh out of prison, former “It Girl” Janie Jenkins—daughter of the late Marion Dressner, a philanthropist best known for her string of rich husbands and reclusive tendencies—chops off her trademark hair and assumes a new name in order to follow an insubstantial lead to the tiny town of Adeline in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where she hopes to uncover the truth behind her mother’s murder, the very crime for which she was incarcerated ten years before.
Because, you see, Janie doesn’t know if she’s guilty or not. While she struggles to keep her identity a secret, Janie soon finds out that her globe-trotting mother was born in this sleepy mountain village, and that after the 1985 fire that claimed the life of Janie’s aunt, she changed her name, skipped town, and never looked back. With the unwilling help of local police chief Leonard LaPlante, Janie follows a series of clues—a missing persons report, a stolen RV, a forgotten diary—and pieces together the surprising picture of her mother's past. And when new evidence from Janie's own past surfaces, she’s forced to consider the possibility that her mother wasn't the good girl everyone thought she was. In the end, on the run from the press, the police, and a possible murderer, Janie is forced to choose between the anonymity that will make her life bearable and the truth she so desperately needs. As Janie guides us through the events leading up to the novel’s shocking conclusion, we can’t help but root for our compellingly complicated narrator even as we join her in questioning her innocence. With this gripping debut novel, Elizabeth Little stands poised to join the ranks of women writing whip-smart, fresh thrillers like Gillian Flynn and Tana French.

Elizabeth Little graduated with honors from Harvard in 2003 with a degree in Social Studies and language citations in Mandarin and Classical Chinese. Her first book, Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic, was published in hardcover by Melville House in 2007 and in paperback by Random House, and her second book, Trip of the Tongue: Cross-Country Travels in Search of America’s Languages was published by Bloomsbury in March 2012 (The Boston Globe said, “Little makes for a perfect tour guide. More than a collection of fascinating linguistic details, by the end this book deepens into a full-throated defense of everybody’s native tongues, and the right - no, the need - to hang onto them.”). A publishing refugee – she worked as an assistant for three agencies before embarking on a career as a full-time writer – Elizabeth now lives in Los Angeles with her husband, a movie director, and two-year-old son. She’s currently studying with David Gates in Bennington’s low-residency MFA program where she earned a fellowship based on a sample of DEAR DAUGHTER.