San Francisco Chronicle book reviewer Rachel Howard's life changed forever when she was just 10 years old. At 3:30 a.m. on June 22, 1986, her stepbrother, Bobby, woke her up.

"Wake up. Rachel, wake up!" he whispered. "I think Daddy cut himself shaving."

Fumbling down the hallway trying to wake up while making some kind of sense out of Bobby's words, Howard suddenly encountered pools of dark blood staining the carpet. She opened the door to her father Stan Howard's bedroom and was horrified to see him "standing bare-chested, deathly white, holding his throat."

Howard writes, "The intruder took a knife from the kitchen and stabbed my father as he lay sleeping next to his third wife. He was pronounced dead at the hospital an hour later."

Howard's absorbing book, The Lost Night: A Daughter's Search For The Truth Of Her Father's Murder, is a memoir of her emotional struggle to come to terms with her father's murder and her attempts to forge a fulfilling life in spite of it. Howard avoids the allure of writing a Mickey Spillane true-crime story and faithfully sticks to the heartfelt self-therapeutic memoir of an emotional, wounded daughter cheated of a father's affection.

Howard, who was bounced between divorced parents before her father's murder, had difficulty finding fulfillment without the guidance of a father. She would make a wreck of her high school and college years straying from one bad relationship to another, each a momentary fix for her loneliness.

Sixteen years after her father's murder, Howard knew she had to somehow deal with her emotional problems. She had a feeling that by facing the repressed memories of that night, she might ease her overlong feelings of being "vulnerable and broken."

Using the tactics of a police reporter, Howard's first step was to invoke the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the police report of her father's murder from the Merced County Sheriff's Department.

After discovering she was the victim's daughter, two detectives agreed to meet Howard and share with her what information they had on the case. Unfortunately, the detectives had more questions for Howard than answers. They were hoping she might have additional information that might help them catch the killer.

But Howard's intention wasn't to make someone pay for the crime; she wanted understanding, not comeuppance. Unlike the police, she didn't see the two goals as inherently bound together.

"I wasn't on a mission to solve my father's murder or convict his killer," Howard writes. "What I wanted was even more elusive, and unlike an investigation full of leads to pursue, there were no clear steps to tracking it down."

Howard knew the detectives didn't have the truth about her father's murder. "They had evidence, and not enough of it, and taken together, even filed tidily into that binder, it did not add up to truth. We were done."

Howard had her theories. There were the usual suspects, such as her sexy Jekyll-and-Hyde stepmother Sherrie, her father's third wife, whom he met at a local watering hole. Around her father, Howard writes, Sherrie would rub her shoulders and tell her she's pretty. Then the minute he went to take a shower or ran to the store, Sherrie would tell Howard that her father has turned her into a brat.

"It was typical nasty-stepmother stuff," Howard writes, "behavior I'd become accustomed to with Howdy (her mother's second, drug-addict husband). I was a professional stepchild, well prepared for this fight."

In the end, still looking for clues, Howard revisits Sherrie and Howdy, who are a shell of their younger selves - Howdy is in rehab and Sherrie at 40 has toned down her sexy persona.

The police suspected Sherrie's brother Steve, whom Stan didn't much care for, of the murder. The killer knew the layout of the house and stabbing as a form of murder is a personal thing, according to investigating detectives.

Neither Howard nor the Merced County Sheriff's Department ever unveil Stan Howard's murderer. But again, The Lost Night isn't about solving a crime. It's about a permanent bond between a father and daughter; it's about healing, acceptance and moving forward with one's emotionally damaged life whole again.

On that score, Howard has solved the most important mystery of all.

Laurence Washington is the co-publisher/ editor of Blackflix.com and teaches journalism at Metropolitan State College of Denver.