The Story Behind Ted Dekker's Book Boneman’s Daughters

The Story Behind Ted Dekker's Book Boneman’s Daughters

Ted: Boneman's Daughters is a very passionate story. It’s about a serial killer called Boneman who is obsessed with finding the perfect daughter. He takes young women, kidnaps them, and when they fail to meet his expectations of what a perfect daughter should be, he kills them. And he does so in a rather gruesome manner, by breaking their bones without breaking their skin. He breaks all of their bones and leaves them to die.

The whole story is centered around this one girl who’s taken. Her name’s Bethany; she’s a bit of a rebel—a very strong-willed person—and her father, who she’s estranged from. When he learns she’s been taken, he just goes ballistic. He goes after Boneman himself. The FBI suspect that he himself might be Boneman, so they go after him. They have this very interesting chase. The whole novel really goes back and forth across the whole state of Texas. But at the heart of this novel is a father’s desperation to recover his daughter.

The story itself was born out of my personal experience. When my daughter was eighteen she was taken, in my view, by a similar kind of character. Now, it wasn’t a serial killer, obviously. It was this guy she’d fallen in love with. In my view though he was like a Boneman. He was an abusive person. She couldn’t see it, but he was dangerous. Because she was eighteen I couldn’t stop her. I could just hope and pray. During that time I began to ask myself about this amazing love I had for my daughter and the emotions that went through me. I would have done anything to protect her, anything to save her. It was then that the roots of this story began to form in my own mind. So in Boneman’s Daughters we explore that. The extremes of a father, and how far would you go to rescue your daughter? Would you kill another man to save your daughter’s life? These are the themes we explore.

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