Mother Daughter Murder Night

Mother-Daughter Murder Night (2023) is a crime novel written by American author Nina Simon. The novel revolves around Jack, a young woman who becomes a murder suspect, and her family’s efforts to prove her innocence. As with many crime novels, the book features both police detectives as well as amateur sleuths. It centers around themes such as Abuse of Power by Law Enforcement, The Limits of Family Bonds, and The Struggles of Powerful Women. The novel was a New York Times bestseller and was chosen for the Reese Witherspoon Book Club.

The 2023 Kindle Harper Collins version of the novel was used for this guide.

Content Warning: This novel includes discussions of gun violence, sexism, abortion, antisemitism, and racism against Latinx and Filipino people that appear in the original text.

Plot Summary

The novel takes place in Elkhorn Slough, a small community in Monterey Bay, California. As the novel opens, Beth and her daughter, Jack, are burying a dead seal in a salt marsh. They use a fancy damask tablecloth that Beth received from her mother, Lana, to carry the animal to its grave. While Beth and Jack are close, Beth and Lana are very different and have a strained relationship.

Lana, a high-powered businessperson, lives alone in Southern California. One day, she falls in her kitchen. Before calling the ambulance, she calls her assistant to cancel her appointment that day. At the hospital, she learns that she has numerous brain tumors. Once she realizes her condition, she calls Beth to come get her, telling her that she has stage-four cancer and that she needs more flattering clothes brought to the hospital.

Because Lana needs surgery and ongoing cancer treatment, she goes to live with Beth and Jack. Beth left her mother’s house years ago when she discovered that she was pregnant out of wedlock as a teen. Lana wanted Beth to abort her baby, but Beth refused. She moved to a foreclosed property her mother owned, and Lana allowed her to live there without paying rent. The two have had a rocky relationship over the years, as the type of help that Lana gives is not of much comfort to Beth. Lana kept expecting Beth to come home to her, and Beth almost did many times, but once Lana realized that Beth was doing well on her own, she did not want to interfere in her life and mess it up. She never told this to Beth, however, and it left Beth feeling rejected. All of these tensions come to light when the three generations of women are living under the same roof.

One day, Jack discovers a dead body while giving a kayak tour. She calls the authorities, and the two lead investigators are Detective Ramirez and Detective Nicoletti. Jack is initially a key suspect in the murder because the deceased man, Ricardo Cruz, was registered for her kayak tour the night before. That tour was a notably rowdy one, as it contained a bachelor party, and the men were drinking and acting out of control, but Ricardo never showed up for the tour. Eventually, it is determined that Ricardo died a day earlier than believed, and Jack is no longer a suspect. Lana, however, has become interested in the death and since she cannot work, she busies herself trying to solve the murder.

Right around the time that Ricardo dies, so does an old man named Hal Rhoads. He dies in his skilled nursing facility, and the automatic assumption is that his death was of natural causes because he had already had three strokes. Lana, Beth, and Jack go to Hal’s funeral. There they meet Victor Morales, who is a conservationist with a land trust and had hoped to form an alliance with Hal. The women discover that Hal and Ricardo, who also worked for the land trust, had been working together on a project concerning the future of Hal’s property. Because of the timing and the two men’s connection, Lana starts to wonder if the two deaths are related. The questions are further intensified as it is discovered that numerous people are interested in the land that Rhoads owned, including his son Martin, his daughter Diana, and the land trust for which Victor—and formerly Ricardo—works.

Lana gets close to Diana to investigate her while Beth gets close to Martin to investigate him. All the while, Lana is very suspicious of Victor. She goes to his office to talk to him, but when he leaves the room, she hears a smoke alarm and realizes that the building is on fire. She cannot open the door. Believing it to be locked, she breaks a window to escape. She believes that Victor might have murdered the two men and set the fire because many documents in his office were destroyed in the fire, which is believed to be arson. Beth, Jack, and Lana are all invited to the Rhoads property one day, and while there, they discover that Martin is the murderer. While they had believed the motive for the murder was land, it turns out that it was familial jealousy. Martin learned that Ricardo was working with Rhoads on a property deal, and out of jealousy, he killed them both. Now, he is planning to kill everybody who knows and make it look like an explosion. At the last moment, however, Jack is able to knock him out and Detective Ramirez arrives and arrests Martin. The detective gets a promotion, and Lana and Beth repair their relationship. Lana is ready to move on to a less intense level of cancer treatment. She moves out of Beth’s house so Jack can have her room back, but she decides to live elsewhere on the property and open a new business locally.