The Second Victim: Daisy's Story

I’ll admit, I was skeptical when I started this audiobook. Another adoption memoir? What could it possibly add to the conversation? Within the first ten minutes, Daisy’s narration yanked me out of my cynicism. Her voice isn’t polished or performative—it’s the voice of someone who’s spent a lifetime being told to soften her edges, and it’s all the more powerful for it. She doesn’t indulge in melodrama; instead, she lays out the facts with surgical precision, letting the horrors speak for themselves. The pacing is masterful—neither rushed nor sluggish, but deliberate, like a metronome ticking toward disaster. That said, there were moments where the audio quality dipped: slight background noise in quieter sections pulled me out of the narrative more than once, and the lack of chapter markers (a baffling omission for a 6+ hour listen) made it harder to pause and process what I’d just heard. Still, the immersion of hearing Daisy’s own inflections—her dry wit, her barely contained fury, the way her voice cracks when she’s describing the most devastating moments—made up for these flaws tenfold. What lingers isn’t just the story of a ‘second victim’ (as the title suggests), but the quiet, insidious ways systems fail the people they claim to save. If you think you’ve heard it all in the true-crime genre, Daisy will prove you wrong.