Raised by a Serial Killer Discovering the Truth About My Father

One evening in 2009, April Balascio is online, as she is every night, looking for unsolved murders in the towns where her family lived when she was growing up. This time she comes across new investigations into the "Sweetheart Murders" cold case. Buried memories of her father's past return at once.

She phones a detective. That call leads her to the truth about her father, Edward Wayne Edwards, who is a serial killer.

This is a memoir. Balascio looks back over a childhood marked by manipulation, sudden moves nobody explained and a fear she kept quiet about. Part of her always sensed what her father could do, and the book follows how she came to know it for certain.

She draws on her own research as well as her intimate recollections, setting her family life beside cold cases and unsolved murders. The book is also the story behind the true crime podcast The Clearing. Reading it is slow, unsettling and personal rather than sensational: the dread comes from a daughter piecing together who raised her.