Outside Valentine

Outside Valentine is a novel by the American writer Liza Ward, published in 2004 and her first.

The book takes its material from the killing spree carried out by Charles Starkweather and his accomplice Caril Ann Fugate, and Ward writes as the granddaughter of two of their victims. It is told from three positions: Caril Ann, remembering how she came to be part of it; a Manhattan collector of antiques named Lowell, who cannot stop reading about the case and whose dreams are full of it; and Lowell's wife, who watches what the obsession is doing to their marriage. Nothing in the novel is written from the killer's side, and the murders are kept at the distance the narrators have from them, which varies from the intimate to the merely fascinated.

The book was written against the author's own family connection to the case, and it was optioned for film, though no film was made. Its three narrators are all, in different ways, living after the event that matters most to them, which is what makes it a study of aftermath rather than of crime.