Tell Your Daddy: Three Mysteries for Father’s Day

by Sharon Tucker



“Fathers are important,” Jesse Stone tells a rebellious teenager in Robert B. Parker’s Night Passage. Love him or hate him, whether he is too present in your life or too absent, whether he’s a good father or a nightmare, and even if he is all of the above--we recognize the father as an inescapable archetype whose influence reverberates throughout our lives, proving to be infinitely fertile ground for writers to plunder. Lee Harris’s The Father’s Day Murder makes surprising use of the holiday as the major theme at the heart of her novel. Jonathan Kellerman’s The Butcher’s Theater strongly illustrates the influence for good or ill a father wields. Leonard Holton’s Out Of The Depths reminds us that not all good fathers sire children.