Rating:

Like Daughter, Like Father?

Author: Ann Rule

California, 1985. A 17-year-old woman (Julia Brown) calls the police, weeping. She thinks her sister, Linda Brown, who is sleeping in the next room, has been shot. The police arrive and Linda’s husband, David Brown, opens the door. In the background, they see Julia in the living room cradling her sister’s baby. Neither Julia nor David had gone into the room to check and see if Linda was indeed shot. Both, however, instantly accuse David’s missing fourteen-year-old daughter, Cinnamon, of the crime.

Fast forward – Cinnamon has confessed to killing her stepmother and is now serving 24 years in jail. But something doesn’t sit quite right with the detectives. David Brown had just taken out a huge insurance policy on his wife, and Julia Brown is suspiciously close to the not-so-grieving man. Could Cinnamon really have done the murder on her own? What about the random bullet in the girls’ bedroom and the fact that neither David nor Julia had gone in to check and see if Linda had been shot?

As the investigation continues, Ann Rule chases the police’s suspicions, digging into David Brown’s life. David is a successful man with a penchant for younger women; is it possible that he seduced Julia into conspiring and helping with her sister’s murder? Was Cinnamon a willing participant or a coerced child? What about the 20+ years David has claimed to have terminal colon cancer? As the web draws tighter around David, Cinnamon breaks and there’s a shocking new twist in the case.

While my favorite Ann Rule offerings are still The 1-5 Killer and The Stranger Beside Me, If You Really Loved Me is another solid addition to Rule’s enormous library of meticulously researched and reported true crime cases.

As you might expect, this one has some rough content. Trigger warnings (other than the obvious one of murder) include parental abuse and rape. This is a story that involves pre-teens, teens, and young women being deceived and manipulated by a sociopath who has no qualms about killing – so long as someone else is at risk of getting caught and punished.

Image by Anil sharma from Pixabay

It’s a twisting case, and detectives use their own personal time to track David. It takes awhile before the full horror of the case is unveiled, and, true to form, Rule gives nothing away early. She follows everything in careful, chronological order, sometimes bogging the narrative down in details and supporting side stories (as is typical for her books). But in the end, she gets there and we get one of the most bizarre cases to date. I really hope Bailey Sarian covers this on Murder, Mystery, and Makeup.

This story isn’t especially gory, but the depth of emotional manipulation and sadism from a parent is deeply upsetting. We’re left shocked by David Brown’s actions and reactions. The million-dollar question that we come to, again and again, in true crime narratives remains elusive: why are some people this evil? We still don’t know, and there is no true answer for what made David Brown into a monster. It is undeniable, however, that he is the monster who ruined multiple women’s lives and ended one innocent woman’s life prematurely.

If You Really Loved Me is a solid and unique addition to Ann Rule’s crime series. Recommended.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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