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.

BTK is one of the serial killers that I have heard a lot about. This book gave a unique inside since it was written by his daughter. I found it very interesting and hard to put down.

Serial killers' relatives are also called "secondary victims" as I can't imagine what is the choc of discovering that someone near you was ruthless killer
This is a personal memoir about BTK's daughter and not about BTK. I read that in a review that we are not able to understand why he became a killer.
Got a news for you if you are expecting to reading about the killings or the mind of a serial killer: nobody know why they became what they are and there's plenty of true crime.
It's moving, it's very personal. It's also a book on how to surive
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Very interesting and insightful read! It gave a great outlook on what people's families go through. It's something that I think most people don't give a lot of thought to.

I think this was interesting as it’s easy to forget about the family of the killer and they’re often unfairly tarred with the same brush. It is also eye opening to read and have examples of how someone could parent ‘normally’ but at the same time equally torture people!

What would you do if someone you loved, someone you thought you knew, turned out to be a serial killer? This book was slow at times and contained a lot of Biblical references, but it was still an informative and emotional read.

“My dad was raising children, yet he chose to take another mother away from her children. He was about to have a daughter yet took two more daughters away from their families.”

“But he was still my father, and I loved him—no matter what he had done.”

This book is such a good read but hard to read at the same time. No one thinks their family member who they love is capable of such horror. It also shows us how these monsters can have 2 sides and blend into to society better then we think. This is great for any true crime fan

This book made me think about the strength of family ties. I found it meaningful to learn about their history, how Kerri and her family coped with the challenges they faced, and everything they went through and experienced after Dennis was arrested.

Yeah this was hard to read. I feel sorry for Kerri. It is interesting to read about the home life of a serial killer. It’s pretty eye opening. Thank you for granting me access to this arc. Overall I enjoyed it.

As someone who has consumed much true crime through television, podcasts and books, reading A Serial Killer's Daughter by Kerri Rawson was definitely a perspective you often don't get to hear. I'm sure this book truly just touched on the surface of the experience of Rawson and her family. I appreciated the perspective that Kerri shared. It's truly hard to rate a book like this because no one can put a rating on one person's incredibly traumatic life experience.

An interesting read highlighting the perspective we don't often see in instances of true crime. The families of the perpetrators aren't often heard from and this was an incredibly intriguing read!

It’s not often we get to hear the children’s side of certain situations involving a criminal parent. I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like. You want to reach the book and give them a hug and at the same time praise them for their bravery for dealing with something they definitely didn’t ask for. Kudos to you Kerri for telling your story, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

In this powerful and deeply personal memoir, Kerri Rawson shares the unimaginable story of discovering that her beloved father, Dennis Rader, was the infamous BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) serial killer.

Raised in what seemed like a normal, loving household, Kerri’s world was shattered in 2005 when the FBI knocked on her door and revealed her father’s horrifying secret. What follows is not just a recounting of crimes, but a courageous journey through shock, betrayal, grief, and ultimately, healing.

Kerri writes with raw honesty and emotional depth as she grapples with reconciling the father she loved with the monster the world came to fear. Her story is one of resilience, faith, and the strength of the human spirit in the face of unimaginable truth. Rather than focusing on the crimes themselves, the memoir centers on the emotional aftermath and the process of rebuilding a life and identity in the shadow of a devastating legacy.

This actually gutted me. Seeing how NORMAL Dennis Radar was and then… he’s killed 10 people. But all the while he’s playing with his kids, helping his daughter move, crying at her wedding, and hiking the Grand Canyon. That’s just absolutely wild.

I felt for Kerri so much. She struggled with hating BTL but still loving her dad. The letters she shared though, it’s crazy how he processes things.

This book tells a crazy story through the eyes of someone who knew a completely different person than the one the rest of us learned about.

This was a poignant and moving memoir. It isn’t meant to be a retelling of BTKs crimes or his life, but the life of his daughter and the impact his crimes had on his family. Betrayal trauma is real and the author takes you through that in a way that highlights the effect he had on her state of mind, trust and perception of the world. The dad she knew was not BTK. He fooled his wife and family as well as everyone else. It’s important to note that this book is also infused with her Christian faith and how it helped her through. Although I am not a religious person, I am glad her faith was able to help her.

I’ve seen interviews where Kerri Rawson was speaking about her father. When I saw this book available to review, I was interested in hear more of her story. Dennis Rader was not a model father. He definitely had anger issues, but nothing that seemed to indicate he was a serial killer.

This book goes over her life from the beginning. Her life is split into “before” and “after” finding out her dad was the BTK killer. While she mentions the victims, this book does not go into detail of the killings. She puts it in context to what was going on in her life at the times the killings took place to try to reconcile how her life could be what it was when her father was doing these horrible things to people. She has some of the letters between the two of them once her father was in jail. She details her struggles with remembering the dad she loves with him being a killer. It affected all aspects of her life and her faith.

It’s clear to see how what he did would devastate the victims’ families but I hadn’t really thought about the effect on his own family. It was chilling how he felt slighted when members of the family chose to totally disconnect from him and felt that was un-Christen of them, knowing the horrible atrocities he had committed. The one part of this book that felt off to me was when Kerri was upset with the prosecutors proceeding with a full disclosure of her father‘s crimes. They checked with the victims’ families to make sure they were with doing this, but they didn’t check with Rader’s family. Dennis Rader’s family members were victims and suffered as a result of his crimes, but it isn’t the same as for the seven families that lost loved ones.

It was an interesting story that I read in one day.

Thank you to the author, Nelson Books, and NetGalley for the review copy of this book and I am voluntarily leaving an honest review.