Santa Barbara Talks: 'A Lovely Girl' Writer Deborah Larkin

She was the daughter of a journalist. She watched her father report local news and become a small-town celebrity. She was enthralled with his stories, and his knowledge of everything from politics to people. And when she was 10 years old, Deborah Holt watched her father, Bob Holt, snoop out one of the biggest stories of his career: the kidnapping and murder of Santa Barbara resident Olga Duncan. Deborah Holt, now Larkin, has just released a book, A Lovely Girl, a spectacular true crime story about how Duncan was abducted from her apartment in the middle of the night and found dead a month later near Ventura. “I was just shocked that this could happen,” Larkin told Noozhawk. “I took it very personally. I identified with Olga and I worried that something like that could happen to me. I am interested in learning about killers, and what motivates them.” Larkin said the biggest lesson she wants people to take from her novel is that a killer is not necessarily a stranger or an intruder. Sometimes, it’s the person in your own home. In the case of A Lovely Girl, it was Duncan’s mother-in-law. The book is also a memoir, with chapters that alternate between true crime and the personal story of Larkin hearing her father clattering away on a typewriter late at night in his study. She soaked up the details of her father’s craft, and, in doing so, learned about the macabre demise of Olga Duncan.