It's pretty impossible to imagine what it's like to one day be standing in your home in your pajamas, open the door to an FBI agent and learn your dad is a prolific serial killer. But that's Kerri Rawson's story. In this memoir, Rawson walks you through the two sections of her life: before and after finding out her dad was BTK.
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I listened on audio and was touched by how gracefully Kerri handled not only relating her story, but how she handled finding out what her dad had done. She pressed into her relationship with God and let her faith be a pillar of her healing. She also openly discusses her mental health and the various healthy and unhealthy ways she sought help.
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If you are interested in true crime stories, memoirs, and/or faith accounts, you will enjoy this book.

A brave effort to tell the BTK story from an often overlooked perspective. For those seeking insights into BTK’s background and possible motivations, this book offers no answers. It exposes the simple fact that killers can come from all walks of life, with no prerequisites to point them out. The ordinariness of the Rader family makes the BTK killings all the more shocking. The heavy focus on religion is a little off putting for me as a reader, but I understand this was key to the author coming to terms with her father’s crimes and what this meant for herself and her family.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Thomas Nelson Books for gifting me a digital ARC of this true crime memoir by Kerri Rawson, daughter of self-proclaimed BTK serial killer. All opinions expressed in this review are my own - 3.5 stars!

In 2005, Kerri Rawson was informed by an FBI agent that her father had been arrested for murdering ten people, including two children. It was then that she learned her father was the notorious serial killer known as BTK, a name he’d given himself that described the horrific way he committed his crimes: bind, torture, kill. As news of his capture spread, Wichita celebrated the end of a thirty-one-year nightmare. For Kerri and her family, another nightmare was beginning.

I feel for Kerri and her family. I believe that they didn't know that their father was a serial killer. I believe that they are victims of him as well. And that's what this book is about - the victimization of Kerri and her family and how they dealt with their trauma. I found it interesting to have Kerri look back and correlate what was happening in her family when her father was committing these brutal murders. Trust the title of this book and know that it is about her and her family and their trauma, rather than a true crime story of how he committed and got away with these murders for so long. We all know that story. There is a lot of religious conversation in this book, and that's how Kerri was able to cope. More power to her. This book may bring hope to those suffering from PTSD.

As others have mentioned, this is primarily a Christian memoir about Kerri‘s life. The book is at 45% before she finds out her dad is a serial killer and the entire book before that is about camping trips, breaking her arm, playing at her grandparents, her cousin dying in a car accident, meeting her husband and God. After she finds out, the rest of the book is about her crappy jobs, her and her husband’s apartment and furniture, how awful everything that happened was for her and her mom, her pregnancies and births of her children, letters back and forth with her father in prison, and lots more about her relationship with God.

We don’t really get much of a glimpse into what on earth made her father such a psychopath and she mostly tries to still portray him as a mostly good guy, which is dumbfounding since even her so called happy memories of him show that he was an abusive, misogynistic, angry, horrible person.

It also was extremely offputting the way she glossed over the horrific things her father did and focused so little on his poor victims, calling her family his other victims. She couldn’t even write what he did in this book, focusing instead on her ptsd from her father’s arrest as if it compared to what others suffered, like the three children her father locked in a bathroom while he murdered their mother.

Lastly, it was rather sickening how often she suggested that God intervened for her in helping her brother during a camping trip, helping her get through upsetting times, etc as though God chose not to save her young cousin from her car crash or to save the men, women and children that her father brutalized, tortured and killed.

I now know all about every minutia of her life but it wasn’t very interesting and she wasn’t very likable, even though I do feel pity for her (not for being BTK‘s daughter as much as being so brainwashed in such a patriarchal, abusive culture that her whole family seems still stuck in).

I read a digital ARC of this book via netgalley.