The Daughter She Used To Be
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
A woman from an NYPD family must find her own sense of justice when tragedy strikes close to home in this novel of grief and courage.
The daughter of a career cop, Bernadette Sullivan grew up with blue uniforms hanging in the laundry room and cops laughing around the dinner table. Her brother joined New York's finest, her sisters married cops, and Bernie is an assistant District Attorney. Collaring criminals, putting them away—it's what they do. And though lately Bernie feels a growing desire for a family of her own, she's never questioned her choices. Then a shooter targets a local coffee shop, and tragedy strikes the Sullivan family.
Anger follows grief—and Bernie realizes that her father's idea of retribution is very different from her own. All her life, she's inhabited a clear-cut world of right and wrong, of morality and corruption. As Bernie struggles to protect the people she loves, she must also decide what it means to see justice served. And in her darkest hour, she will find out just what it means to be her father's daughter.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Noonan (In a Heartbeat) delivers another earnest drama exploring how lives and family relationships can, in a heartbeat, change utterly. The Sullivans are a family of New York City cops. The father, now retired and running a coffee shop "Sully's Cup" near their local Queens precinct, is a legend in the community. They are the type of family that expresses disappointment when youngest daughter Bernadette, rather than marrying a cop, as did her sister Mary Kate, remains single and goes to work in the DA's office. But that disappointment pales in comparison to what comes from her decision to volunteer her legal skills to help defend a man who entered Sully's Cup seeking vengeance and killed several cops, including her brother, the youngest son in the family. The dramatic stakes are high in Noonan's world (her husband, like Sully, retired from the NYPD), but the Sullivan family's dialogues on faith, grief, and loyalty are riddled with overwrought clich s, as is her portrayal of the stereotype-perpetuating African-American shooter. Not helping is Noonan's prose, perfunctory at best, a grammatical quagmire at worst.
