'How could I even think about creating a novel with a young woman in a life-threatening situation?' 'I went weak after Kait's murder,' Duncan told BuzzFeed interviewer Tim Stelloh. Hotel for Dogs became a 2009 film starring Emma Roberts and Jake T. Duncan documented their search in the 1992 book Who Killed My Daughter?Īfter her daughter's murder, Duncan wrote mainly picture books, as well as two sequels to Hotel for Dogs, a book published in 1971 about children who take in stray animals. The police considered the death a random shooting, according to news accounts, and no one was convicted of the killing.ĭuncan and her husband embarked on a private investigation that included psychics, ultimately concluding that their daughter had perhaps been targeted because she had knowledge of a rental car insurance fraud scheme involving the criminal underworld. 'It was as if these things I'd written about as fiction became hideous reality,' Duncan told an interviewer, according to the reference guide Contemporary Authors. Kaitlyn had been the inspiration for the novel's fictional heroine, April, who was chased in a car by a hit man. Shortly after its publication, Duncan's 18-year-old daughter, Kaitlyn Arquette, was fatally shot twice in the head while driving. In 1989, Duncan published Don't Look Behind You, a novel about a family thrust into the witness-protection program after the father testifies against a drug dealer. Stranger With My Face (1981) involved an evil twin seeking to possess her sister's body through astral projection. Summer of Fear (1976), about a teenage girl and her strange cousin, dipped its toe in witchcraft. In Down a Dark Hall (1974), Duncan ventured into the supernatural, setting the story at a haunted boarding school for girls. I Know What You Did Last Summer, published in 1973, centres on four teenagers who accidentally kill a young bicyclist and leave the scene, vowing to keep the incident a secret even as their sense of guilt – and a mysterious menace professing to know what they had done – becomes increasingly frightening. Duncan was credited with helping establish the genre of young-adult fiction – literature carefully tailored for readers who are neither children nor grown-ups, who know more than it may seem but not enough to make their way in the world.ĭuncan plucked her characters from normalcy and placed them in extraordinary, often dark circumstances.

Daughters of eve lois duncan summary