Susie's parents in The Lovely Bones both experience guilt for their daughter's death – 'The guilt on him, the hand of God pressing down on him, saying "You were not there when your daughter needed you"'. Family tragedies are known for producing spiraling guilt and is what many feel when they cannot do anything else. On the other hand, Camille's mother feels no guilt for Marian's death, highlighting how detached she is from her family and revealing her mental illness which is found out later on in the book to be Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome. Both murderers in these books are automatically presumed to be male. The first time that the policeman tells Susie's family that she was murdered in The Lovely Bones, he says that 'He gagged her with it'. This presumption goes unnoticed by the family and highlights the stereotypical belief that most of the time, males are the murderers. This speculation is reiterated in Sharp Objects where Camille and the police all presume that the murderer is male until she speaks to a boy who claims he saw a woman take one of the girls. Immediately, Camille tries to convince herself that he is wrong, saying 'I didn't think he was lying. But children digest terror differently'. No one believes that the killer is female because, apparently, women don't behave in that way. .
The murderer in The Lovely Bones (Mr. Harvey) is extremely calm with the situation throughout the book – as if he believed that he did not commit the murder. Susie points this out as she watches him from 'the in-between', saying 'He wore his innocence like a comfortable old coat'. This simply summarises Mr. Harvey's character: the serial killer who has killed and got away with it so often that he almost believes his own innocence. The murderers in Sharp Objects (Camille's mother, Adora, and sister, Amma) are also portrayed in this way. Many could say that Adora seems to believe her own innocence due to the fact that, because of her mental illness, she actually does – unlike Mr.
