The Good Daughter Book Ends On A Hopeful Note

Content warning: This piece mentions sexual assault, suicide, and gun violence.

Based on Karin Slaughter’s 2017 novel of the same name, Peacock’s The Good Daughter is a moving testament to sisterhood. But both the book and show will put you through the wringer.

Meghann Fahy and Rose Byrne star as Charlie and Sam, sisters from small-town Pikeville, Georgia who become estranged in the aftermath of a violent, life-altering attack. Years later, another tragedy brings them back into each other’s orbit.

If you’d like to peek ahead at the events of Slaughter’s best-selling novel — or perhaps want to compare the page and screen versions — here’s The Good Daughter plot summary and book ending.

Growing up, Charlie and Sam’s father, Rusty, is nicknamed the “Attorney for the Damned” due to his penchant for taking on controversial cases. Their home is burned down by an arsonist angry that Rusty helped a man wrongly convicted of murder walk free. Days later, two men arrive at their new temporary dwelling when Rusty isn’t home, and while the girls don’t discover their true motive until decades later, one man’s sister had died by suicide after she was raped by a man Rusty defended.

One of the men, Zach, shoots and kills the girls’ mother, Gamma. They take the girls into the woods where they disagree about what to do next — and while the unidentified man tries to stop Zach from further killing, he accidentally shoots Sam in the head during a scuffle.

Charlie runs away but is caught and raped by Zach. She finds refuge in the home of a neighbor, Judith — later learning that Sam actually survived the gunshot wound, though she’ll go on to experience lifelong effects. When Rusty returns home and finds out what’s happened, he urges Charlie to keep the assault a secret, worried that a trial will retraumatize her.

As time goes on, Charlie stays in the area and pursues criminal defense like her dad. Sam moves to New York and works in patent law, and the sisters stop seeing each other after a big fight — with Charlie telling Sam that seeing each other only reminds them of that terrible day.

Twenty-eight years after the attack, Charlie is visiting the middle school where Huck, a teacher with whom she’s had a one-night stand, works. While there, she witnesses a school shooting that leaves the school’s Principal Pinkman and a young student, Lucy, dead. The purported shooter is Kelly Wilson, a student with an intellectual disability.

Rusty believes that despite appearances, Kelly did not commit the shooting. He is soon stabbed — presumably by a disgruntled townsperson — and though he appears to recover, reuniting with Sam as she returns from New York to help with the case, he ultimately dies. In the aftermath, Charlie and Sam reconnect and open up to each other.

They also learn that Huck was the unidentified man from that night in their childhood. Police believed it was Zach’s brother, Daniel, and killed him, but later, Huck confessed to Rusty that it was him. To avoid dredging up his daughters’ trauma, Rusty wrote regular checks to the son of an imprisoned Zach, to prevent the assailant from voicing the truth about Huck’s role in the attacks.

As for Kelly, the sisters discover that she was impregnated by Principal Pinkman. His wife — who is in fact Judith, who helped Charlie as a child — admits that she was angered by his desire to raise the child, and decided to kill him by framing Kelly as the shooter. Lucy was accidentally killed in the process. Instead of facing the authorities, Judith dies by suicide after being confronted by Charlie. Even so, Kelly is still sentenced to 10 years in prison. Charlie reconnects with her estranged husband, Ben, and the sisters plan to see each other more often.