Murder in the Family

by Cara Hunter

Twenty years ago, Luke Ryder was found dead in the back garden of the house he shared with his family in an affluent neighbourhood of London. His two teenage stepdaughters arrived home that evening from a movie and found his body, his face and head brutally beaten. Their ten-year-old brother was asleep upstairs, and their mother was out at a party. The killer was never found; the police investigation at the time reached a dead end.

Now the case is the subject of a television true-crime series. Six acknowledged experts in crime scene investigation, forensic psychology, and the law will re-examine the circumstances and evidence. The hope is that, by bringing fresh eyes and new investigative techniques to bear, they’ll be able at long last to identify the perpetrator.

Film maker Guy Howard, the director of the series, has a special reason to want to solve it: he was the ten-year-old boy in the case. The crime traumatized him and devastated his family. He hopes that resolution will bring relief to all of them.

The striking thing about this novel is that it is presented as a screenplay, a transcript of the participants’ exchanges on each of the eight episodes in the television series. We learn about the progress of the investigation through the words of the experts appearing on the broadcast, following along with them each week as they reveal new details as they discover them. Interspersed between the weekly episodes are newspaper reviews, diagrams, social media commentary, and other mixed media elements reflecting on the case or the broadcasts.

This format takes a bit of getting used to, but it creates a “you are there” feeling to the novel, as the reader follows the investigation at the same time as the participants, experiencing several surprising, even shocking, developments right along with them (including the final resolution.)

This is Cara Hunter’s eighth novel, and the first standalone. It’s been a bestseller, and was listed as one of the best crime novels of 2023 by the Guardian, the Financial Times, and Waterstones.

Hunter has included maps, interview transcripts, crime scene drawings, and social media snippets in her previous novels, but these appeared between the narrated action. In Murder in the Family she takes this further, eliminating narration entirely so that the reader experiences the story unfolding as if following it on screen. 

Hunter can’t remember not knowing how to read. Growing up, there weren’t a lot of books in her family home, but weekly visits to the library fuelled her lifelong love of reading — which ultimately led her to Oxford University, where she completed an English literature degree in the 1980s.  She then moved to London for fifteen years, where she worked in public relations and as a freelance copywriter. She says these jobs gave her a lot of useful experience as well as a healthy respect for meeting deadlines. In 2003, she returned to Oxford for a PhD. 

She’s long been a fan of crime fiction and TV crime programs such as CSI or Broadchurch. On vacation with her husband, she threw a paperback thriller down because she found its ending disappointing. Her husband suggested that she write one herself, and by the time they returned home, she had written a rough synopsis for a novel. That eventually became Close to Home, the first in her police procedural series featuring DI Adam Fawley, which was published in 2017. Since then, she has published six more novels in the DI Fawley series.

Her books have now sold more than a million copies worldwide. In 2019, her first book, Close to Home, was shortlisted for Crime Book of the Year in the British Book Awards. That same year, her third novel, No Way Out, was selected by the Sunday Times as one of the 100 best crime novels since 1945.

Cara and her husband live in Oxford with their cat.

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