An account of a journalist's investigation into the unsolved murder of her father describes the events surrounding his death when the author was ten years old, her adulthood reconnection with her father's family, and her struggles to come to terms with his loss. 20,000 first printing. Howard, an arts writer for the San Francisco Chronicle , delivers a stunning debut. Forgoing the true-crime treatment, Howard remains restrained, her focus on the broad emotional panorama of the story instead of lurid details and self-pity. In crisp, unadorned prose, she explores broken families, drugs, rural California, and the hard emotional work of remembering. The Washington Post notes a "flavor of journal-writing" to The Lost Night , but it’s a mere quibble overshadowed by the heady chorus of critical praise. "[N]o novel based on Ms. Howard’s life," concludes The Wall Street Journal , "no matter how skillfully crafted, could have been as believable as The Lost Night ." Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. The death of a parent is a pivotal event in any child's life, no matter how old he or she is when it occurs; but for 10-year-old Rachel, her father's murder in the bedroom of their tiny Merced, California, home became the moment that would define the rest of her life. Stan Howard may have been the quintessential small-town "Good Time Charlie" of the 1980s, a mullet-haired, party-hardy, womanizing Rod Stewart aficionado, but who would stab him to death as he lay sleeping next to his third wife became a mystery that remains unsolved to this day. Perpetually haunted by his death, emotionally scarred by the unstable home life she experienced in its aftermath, Rachel endured years of self-destructive behavior and suicidal depression before finally gaining the strength to confront the painful, if not always accurate, memories of the night when her world changed forever. The result is an abundantly candid and dramatically riveting account of one young woman's courageous determination to understand the unfathomable. Carol Haggas Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Rachel Howard currently covers dance and writes book reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle . She has also written for The Village Voice, The San Francisco Examiner, The Orange County Register, The Santa Barbara Independent , and Dance Magazine . "At about three thirty a.m. on June 22, 1986, someone entered, through an unlocked sliding-glass door, my father's house on the outskirts of the central California farming town where he had grown up," Rachel Howard notes in the prologue to her heartfelt memoir. "The intruder took a knife from the kitchen and stabbed my father as he lay sleeping next to his third wife. He was pronounced dead at the hospital an hour later." That kind of scenario often introduces a slash-happy police procedural or blood-spattered true-crime story, but The Lost Night is neither of those. Howard is far more concerned with the long-term emotional consequences of murder than with the grisly details of the crime itself. Similarly, the truth to which she refers in her subtitle has less to do with finding Stan Howard's killer than with discovering who she is. Her decision to call the detectives who investigated the killing 16 years after it happened stemmed primarily from her long-held conviction that her father's death had left her "vulnerable and broken." Howard, a San Francisco-based arts writer, concluded that putting the pieces back together would require confronting her memories of the crime and her father, both of which she had long repressed. But she was beset with doubts even as she sought out policemen and called long-estranged relatives who had been in contact with her father in the days before his murder. She was clear on her mission, she writes, but not on her motive: "I was trying to live my life according to some made-for-TV script wherein the heroine, haunted by her father's past, devotes her life to bringing his killer to justice. But that heroine wasn't me. . . . I'd never set out to 'solve' my father's murder. But then what had I set out to do? And how would I know when I had done it?" Howard's search for lost time leads back to a childhood made difficult by the troubled adults on whom she depended. She persuasively observes that "ten is an especially inconvenient age to lose your father," a situation made even more dire by her unsteady living conditions. Her parents had "been good friends through high school before eloping on a whim" and landing in a marriage that quickly grew intolerable. At the mercy of her parents' subsequent, ill-chosen partners, Howard became "a professional stepchild" accustomed to mistreatment while shuttling back and forth between Fresno and Merced, Calif. She was often afraid of her father's third wife (unlike the second, with whom she still enjoys a close relationship), and her mother's second husband was a terror as well. An abusive jock-turned-drug addict,