A Mother Would Know

A taut psychological thriller for fans of Shari Lapena and Megan Miranda about a woman who asks her estranged son to move home, only to confront memories of his disturbing adolescent behavior when a local woman is found dead.

Valerie has been forgetting things. She suspects that she’s suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s, just like her mother had—but if she is, she thinks stubbornly, best not to involve doctors. She wants to live as many years as she can on her own terms. Valerie’s daughter Kendra worries about her being all alone in her big Victorian home, one rumored to be haunted after a tragedy decades earlier, and truth be told, she is a little lonely. With few options, she asks her estranged 25-year-old son Hudson to move in. It’s not quite the reunion she expected. He’s taciturn, moody, and frequently gone to hang out with his deadbeat friends. But it’s a start.

Then, a week later, a young woman is found murdered in her home a block from Valerie’s place. A woman they'd been introduced to a few nights before. Val remembers the way Hudson looked at her. And, she recalls nervously, the night of her death, Hudson had been out until after three in the morning, after receiving and ominous texts from a woman he’d dubbed “Blondie.”

It’s a crazy, horrible thing to even wonder…but this isn’t the first suspicious case Hudson’s been tied to. Valerie is now forced to confront all the memories of odd behavior she’d discounted when her son was younger. Preoccupied with her career and a secret affair with a band mate, she’d chalked it up to normal boy behavior. A phase he’d grow out of. But now she wonders if she’s enabled a monster. A monster she is living with, alone.

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