The Officer's Daughter: A Memoir of Family and Forgiveness

Written by Elle Johnson

Narrated by Janina Edwards

""The Officer’s Daughter is a masterpiece. More than that, it's the perfect book for our troubled time. Johnson has written the deepest, most emotionally resonant understanding of forgiveness and justice I have ever read.""—Darin Strauss, bestselling author of Half a Life

The author reflects on a terrible tragedy that forever altered the fabric of her family in this remarkable memoir, a heart-wrenching story of love, violence, coming of age, secrets, justice, and forgiveness. 

When she was sixteen, Elle Johnson lived in Queens with her family; she dreamed of being best friends with her popular, cool cousin Karen from the Bronx.  Coming from a family of black law enforcement officers, Elle felt that Karen would understand her in a way no one else could. Elle’s father was a highly protective, at times overbearing, parole officer; her uncle, Karen’s dad, was a homicide detective. 

On an ordinary night, the Johnson family’s lives were changed forever. Karen was shot and killed in a robbery gone wrong at the Burger King where she worked. The NYPD and FBI launched a cross-country manhunt to find the killers, and the subsequent trials and media circus marked the end of Elle's childhood innocence.

Thirty years later, Elle was living in Los Angeles and working as a television writer, including on many police procedural shows, when she received an unexpected request. One of Karen’s killers was eligible for parole, and her older brother asked Elle to write a letter to the parole board arguing against his release. Elle realized that before she could condemn a man she’d never met to remain in prison, she had to face the hard truths of her own past: of a family who didn’t speak of the murder and its devastating effect, of the secrets they buried, of a complicated father she never truly understood. 

The Officer's Daughter is a piercing memoir that explores with unflinching honesty what parents can and cannot do to protect their children, the reverberations of violence on survivors’ lives, and the overwhelming power of forgiveness, even in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Feb 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9780063011359

Elle Johnson

Raised in Hollis, Queens and educated at Harvard, Elle got her first writing job on HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREETS. Her credits include everything from THE FOSTERS and FINDING CARTER to LAW & ORDER and THE GLADES. She is currently co-showrunning MADAM CJ WALKER at Netflix and has done everything from working in Cairo after graduation to riding a bike across country for a cause. 

Reviews for The Officer's Daughter

[Kim Ring · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed the narrators voice but the book itself was kind of.... Meh! It is about a woman coming to understand and accept her physically abusive father, oh yeah and her cousin got killed. I thought it would be more about the murder, the perpetrators, the family members lives but it was not in my opinion.

[misslissa23 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

OK, I don’t like to talk about someone’s memoirs as being flawed, but I received an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

I did not like this book at all. It’s a short story, and yet I really struggled to get through it. I like crime stories and enjoy this genre yet I couldn’t get into this book or the characters. The flow and the set up were all wrong. It flip-flopped between present and past, which is fine and I think everyone is used to that style by by now in books, but sometimes it was unclear which timeframe the author was speaking about. She would date chapter headers as past present etc., and then proceed to change into another timeframe. It just didn’t fit and seemed like she was saying “Oh, I have something to tell you, let me just stick this here.” It was like listening to somebody’s train of thought that just came out of their head and out on to paper, instead of a book that should’ve been logically thought out. Things were very missed miss-matched and haphazard. This made it hard to follow what was going on sometimes and get into the characters. The characters were real life people who you were supposed to have some sort of a emotion for but ultimately I just didn’t, and I feel bad about that, but I think this needs a lot of work because it could be good!