The Wrong Mother

Starred review from August 3, 2009
Sally Thorning, part-time environment rescuer and full-time mother, struggles to maintain her sanity and juggle the overwhelming demands of work and home in this superior psychological mystery from British author Hannah (Little Face
). During a week away from her husband and children, Sally has a brief affair. A year later a local headline tragedy—Sally's lover's wife appears to have murdered her six-year-old daughter then committed suicide—reveals that Sally's lover was not who he claimed to be and she needs to find out why. After surviving a shove in front of a bus, Sally re-examines that unwise affair as she plays amateur detective and nearly loses all she values in the process. The story alternates between Sally's confessional and a tight police procedural interspersed with evidence—pages torn from the diary of the alleged daughter-killer. Paced like a ticking time bomb with flawlessly distinct characterization, this is a fiercely fresh and un-put-downable read. 5-city author tour.

Starred review from August 1, 2009
The stress of mothering young children while working outside the home is at the center of this British mystery thats part psychological thriller and part police procedural. Much as she loves her four-year-old daughter and two-year-old son, Sally Thorning jumps at the chance to take a weeklong work trip abroad and catch up on her sleep. When the trip falls through, she secretly books the time at a hotel, where she impulsively spends the week with a man who introduces himself as Mark Bretherick. A year later shes shocked at news of the apparent familicide deaths of Geraldine Bretherick and her five-year-old daughter. Not only is Sally a dead ringer for Geraldine, but the grieving husband and father is not the man she knew as Mark. (Family men here are absent, preoccupied, deceptive, or delusional.) As the risk to Sally increases, her anonymous notes to police lead to the discovery of other bodies, with canny investigation by romantically involved Detective Constable Simon Waterhouse and Detective Sergeant Charlie Zailer, introduced in Little Face (2007). A best-seller in Britain, where it was published in 2008 as The Point of Rescue, this gripping novel deserves similar success here.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)