Publishers Weekly

"Rights Alert"

Feburary 7, 2003

Dutton Gets Memoir of Murdered Father

A memoir by a young San Francisco journalist who witnessed her father's murder as a child and has set out to explore the circumstances and perhaps find his murderer, was bought for world rights by Laurie Chittenden at Dutton.

It's called "My Father's Keeper," by Rachel Howard of the San Francisco Examiner, and agent Noah Lukeman describes it as like a cross between James Ellroy's "My Dark Places," which told a similar story of the death of his mother, and "The Lovely Bones."

Howard's grandparents abandoned her after the killing and her mother took her to live with an abusive, drug-addicted stepfather. She suffered depression and mental breakdown before she built a career and decided to pursue the truth of her father's unsolved murder.