At some point in the last ~3 years I've read a book about a family trying to escape from a shapehifter who was hunting the women of that family for generations. The book was written in different timelines so that you would get to know the female main character, as well as her mother and the antagonist over the course of the book. I will try to present the three story aspects I remember without switching between them.
It started in our current time with a family trying to escape from something in their car on their way to a safehouse in the mountains. The father is heavily wounded and the little daughter in sleeping in the back of the car while the mother is driving. They meet with an old friend of her late father who is helping by patching up the father. Her late father died recently, which was the beginning of the chase and later the shapeshifter appears in the form of her late father trying to bring her out of her safehouse. The shapehifter kills the father but the in the end the mother manages to kill the shapeshifter, which is the Happy End.
The protagonists mothers timeline is written from the perspective of the protagonists father. He is an academic and meets a woman in the library and after some quarrels they fall in love. She later tells him that there is a shapeshifter haunting her family for several generations, always eliminating the people closest to the women to be with them at some point. He doesn't believe her, but later they settle down. But he makes a mistake when he is publishing a book with his and her name in it. This allows the shapehifter to find them.
This is one of the scenes I remember most vividly, though I am missing the exact details and am merely trying to convey the style of the scene. She is alone at home and her husband comes back from work. They talk about their day and have sex, but then she says that he asks about the books on her nightstand. A harmless question, but those books contain the information her family wrote down over the last generations about the shapeshifter and are an incredibly important aspect of her life. There is no way her husband could have forgotten about them. So she slowly gets up like nothing happened and says that she wants to make coffee. Her husband hates coffee. And says he'd love a cup.
So she goes down and continues asking questions about whether he picked up the car from the mechanic. Her husband answers that he didn't manage to do that today. Sadly they didn't have a car. After a few questions he comes close to her and she throws the coffee at the shapeshifter. They get into a fight and he ties her to a chair. He goes searching through the house and finds a picture of her daughter. As she won't tell him anything about her family he kills her in a very brutal way. Something like putting his hands to her head and through magic making her ears and eyes basically explode.
When her real husband returns he sees her in the chair and immediately calls his daughter in school for their personal emergency drill. This scene was very heartbreaking. Basically:
Father: "Do you need anything? We won't be able to come back."
Daughter: "Only you and mommy."
The origin of the shapeshifter begins in eastern Europe, while the rest of the book is in America. The shapeshifter is from a family of shapeshifters but was some kind of outsider for some reason. When he was supposed to start being the heir of his father he decided to go drinking with normal people instead of being on the ball. He drinks with a guy and a girl and falls in love with the girl. To get her he kills the guy and shapehifts into his form. She realizes this and this is basically the beginning of him haunting her family. Always trying to find her and replace someone who is close to her.
I would like to read this book again. Can you help me remember what the name of this book is?