A Mother Would Know
A Novel
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3.9 • 23 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Do we ever really know our children? Amber Garza invites readers to untangle the web of a family just like yours—or are they? This thriller will have you triple-guessing yourself.” —Eliza Jane Brazier, author of If I Disappear
A mother questions everything she knows about her son when a local woman is found dead.
Valerie has been forgetting things. Her daughter worries about her being on her own in her big Victorian house—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 adult son to move home, but it’s not quite the reunion she hoped for. Hudson is taciturn, moody and frequently gone.
The neighbors already hold a grudge against Hudson, and they aren’t happy about his return. When a young woman is found murdered a block away, suspicion falls on him immediately, without a shred of evidence. While Valerie fights to defend her son, she begins to wonder who she really invited into her home.
It’s a horrible thing for a mother to even think…but is it possible she’s enabled a monster? A monster she is living with, alone?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Widow Valerie Jacobs, the narrator of this propulsive thriller from Garza (Where I Left Her), regrets her sometimes careless parenting back when she was part of a popular band and her son, Hudson, and her daughter, Kendra, were young. That Valerie's memory begins to fail in her 50s recalls her mother's early-onset Alzheimer's. Perfectionistic Kendra is too overwhelmed by nursing school and a baby to offer hands-on care, so Valerie asks Hudson to come and live in her old Sacramento, Calif., home. She hopes to rebuild the closeness they once shared, but Hudson, an aimless drifter in his mid-20s, is more interested in partying with friends. As old tensions between Hudson and Kendra reemerge, a sexy young woman who lives nearby is strangled shortly after she and Hudson are introduced. An incident from Hudson's adolescence unites the neighborhood against him despite the lack of evidence, and Valerie struggles to balance a mother's unconditional belief in her son with fears that he was indeed involved in the crime. Combining high drama with issues—aging, sibling rivalry, the shadow of past mistakes—to which most readers can relate, Garza keeps the fast-paced plot twists going into the book's final pages. Fans of smart, female-centered thrillers will love this.
