Ten top titles in mother-daughter noir

Lisa Levy is a columnist and contributing editor at LitHub and CrimeReads. At the latter she tagged ten books in which "mothers and daughters are trying to reconnect, protect each other, and reckon with their formative bond," including:

The Lost Ones, by Sheena Kamal

The first book in Canadian Kamal’s Nora Watts series is a twisted story of—what else?—a missing girl. Watts, a recovering addict and underemployed depressive, gets a call that Bonnie, the daughter she put up for adoption years before, has run away from her adoptive family. Thinking Bonnie might go looking for her birth mother, Bonnie’s adoptive father contacts Nora and asks for her help in the search for Bonnie. Watts is still dealing with her own demons after a childhood spent in foster care and her fall into addiction, but she cares enough about her daughter to try and find her, revealing parts of the past she’d rather not reckon with.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Lost Ones.

--Marshal Zeringue