My Darling Daughter

My Darling Daughter by J.P. Delaney is a standalone psychological thriller published in 2022, his fifth novel following The Girl Before, Believe Me, The Perfect Wife, and Playing Nice.

Susie Jukes has spent fifteen years carrying a secret she's never shared with her husband Gabe: a daughter, born when Susie was very young, given up for adoption in circumstances she's never fully made peace with. So when a teenage girl named Anna reaches out to her out of the blue on social media, claiming to be that daughter, Susie's instinct is immediate and overwhelming - she wants back in this girl's life, whatever it costs her. What Susie and Gabe discover as they get to know Anna, though, is a home life that sounds increasingly troubling, and adoptive parents whose reaction to the contact seems disproportionate at best. Susie becomes convinced Anna needs rescuing. The question the novel spends its length complicating is whether that instinct is right - and whether Susie, given her own buried history, is in any position to trust her own judgment about what's actually happening here.

Delaney tells the story through Multiple POV chapters - Susie, Gabe, and Anna herself all narrate in turn - and that structure is doing real work: each perspective recontextualises what readers thought they understood about the last one, and the Unreliable Narrator tension builds less from any single character lying outright than from each of them genuinely believing their own version of events. The Dark Secrets unearthed as Susie pulls Anna closer go well beyond the adoption itself, touching on infertility, loss, and a hidden history Susie has spent a decade and a half trying not to think about - her own Trauma and Healing is as much the engine of the plot as the mystery surrounding Anna.

What makes the central Family Legacy so unsettling is how thoroughly Delaney complicates the reader's sympathies. Susie and Gabe are easy to root for, and just as easy to watch make decisions that escalate a difficult situation into something considerably more dangerous. The Mystery and Secrets Revealed across the book's second half forces a reckoning with exactly how much of what Anna has presented can be trusted, and the Twist Ending has proven among the more divisive in Delaney's catalogue - some readers find the escalating reveals a gripping, page-turning payoff; others feel the back half asks for more credulity than the grounded family drama of the opening chapters earns.

Delaney is explicit in his author's note that the novel draws on real, difficult questions around adoption, fostering, and the systems meant to protect vulnerable children - and reviewers have generally found that the heavier material is handled with care rather than exploited for shock value, even as the plot itself escalates into increasingly high-stakes territory. For readers drawn to domestic suspense built on conflicting loyalties and a genuinely unsettled question of who to trust, My Darling Daughter offers a tense, fast-paced entry in Delaney's catalogue, even for those left more divided on where it ultimately lands.