Duncan would be consumed by her personal investigation into the murder for the rest of her life, writing two books on the subject, Who Killed My Daughter? (1992) and One to the Wolves (2013). Best known for her YA thrillers, she was a contemporary of Judy Blume, taking on some of the same social issues of Gen-Xers (particularly relating to the Women’s Movement), but never quite reaching Blume’s stature in the popular imagination, probably because she backgrounded those issues with occasionally lurid tales involving witchcraft, psychic powers, kidnapping and murder.ĭespite (or more likely, because of) the genre trappings, Duncan was able to occasionally push the envelope even further than Blume, Norma Klein, Sandra Scoppettone, and other “serious” YA writers when dealing with these issues, while never sacrificing the emotional honesty she affords to her (largely teenage and female) characters.ĭuncan wrote roughly a dozen and a half YA novels in this vein between the early 1960s and the late 1980s, before taking a hiatus due to a personal tragedy: the murder of her youngest daughter in 1989, a case which remains unsolved. Like many readers, I was saddened to hear about the sudden death of Lois Duncan last week, at the age of 82.
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