Kindle: In 1992, Lois Duncan, acclaimed author of fictional suspense novels, wrote a horror story she could never have imagined writing - a true account of the murder of her own daughter, Kaitlyn Arquette.
Kait, 18, was shot to death as she drove home from a friend's house on a Sunday evening in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1989.
Police closed the unsolved case as a "random shooting," refusing to accept information that indicated otherwise, although it had all the earmarks of a professional hit.
That first book, Who Killed My Daughter? (1992), was Duncan's desperate attempt to motivate informants and prevent the facts of Kait's story from becoming buried.
It turned out to accomplish much more than that.
Duncan's new book, One to the Wolves: On the Trail of a Killer (2013), is even more horrifying than its predecessor as new information poured in, the family ran for their lives, and their original suspicions turned out to be the tip of an iceberg so immense that Kait herself could not have known how dangerous the information was that she had been sitting on in order to protect a now-estranged boyfriend.
Since Kait didn't live to reveal it, her mother, determined to search for justice, now does so in a book so intense and yet so painfully human that the reader will never forget it.
All of the elements of a suspenseful mystery are here - intrigue, turns and twists, cover-ups and page-turning action.
The sobering fact is that, this time, the story isn't fiction.
Perhaps most chilling is the fact that the cover art is an etching of a wolf that Kait made when she was ten years old.
Is it possible that, even then, she was having nightmares about the predator who would come for her eight years later?
This is probably the only occasion when a murder victim was the cover artist for a book about her own tragic death.
About the author: Lois Duncan is the author of more than fifty books for young adults. Her stories of mystery and suspense have won dozens of awards and many have been named "Best Books for Young Adults" by the American Library Association. She is most proud of her Margaret A Edwards Award presented to honour an author for a distinguished body of work for young adults. Some of her novels have been adapted for film, including I Know What You Did Last Summer and Hotel for Dogs (2009).
Lois Duncan was born Lois Duncan Steinmetz in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 28 April 1934. Her parents, Lois and Joseph Janney Steinmetz, were both professional photographers. Since her parents' work required travel, Duncan and her brother often tagged along and these trips supplied Duncan with ample writing material. Duncan began writing poetry and stories as soon as she could spell. By age ten she was submitting her work to magazines and she had her first story published nationally when she was only thirteen years old. Through her teen years her work was frequently published by magazines such as Seventeen and the Saturday Evening Post.
Her first book, Debutante Hill (1957) was published after winning a contest conducted by Dodd, Mead & Company, a major publishing house that has since ceased operations. She taught journalism at the University of New Mexico and finished her own college degree in English. Even while producing hundreds of articles for magazines such as Reader's Digest and Ladies Home Journal, Duncan penned dozens of books. Her novels are often filled with suspense and a sense of the eerie and supernatural, with elements including mystic visions and ghostly presences.
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