The Mother-in-Law
A Novel
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4.2 • 1.8K Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
• "Deliciously entertaining!" —People Magazine's "People Pick"
• Entertainment Weekly's "MUST List"
• O Magazine’s "15 Best Beach Books of the Year So Far"
• Bustle "Best Book of April"
• Refinery29 "Best Book of April"
• Cosmopolitan "Best Book of April"
• Woman's Day's "27 Fiction Books of 2019 to Add to Your Reading List ASAP"
• BookBub's "Biggest Books of April"
• PopSugar's "30 Must-Read Books of 2019"
A twisty, compelling new novel about one woman's complicated relationship with her mother-in-law that ends in death...
From the moment Lucy met her husband’s mother, she knew she wasn’t the wife Diana had envisioned for her perfect son. Exquisitely polite, friendly, and always generous, Diana nonetheless kept Lucy at arm’s length despite her desperate attempts to win her over. And as a pillar in the community, an advocate for female refugees, and a woman happily married for decades, no one had a bad word to say about Diana…except Lucy.
That was five years ago.
Now, Diana is dead, a suicide note found near her body claiming that she longer wanted to live because of the cancer wreaking havoc inside her body.
But the autopsy finds no cancer.
It does find traces of poison, and evidence of suffocation.
Who could possibly want Diana dead? Why was her will changed at the eleventh hour to disinherit both of her children, and their spouses? And what does it mean that Lucy isn’t exactly sad she’s gone?
Fractured relationships and deep family secrets grow more compelling with every page in this twisty, captivating new novel from Sally Hepworth.
Praise for Sally Hepworth:
“With jaw-dropping discoveries, and realistic consequences, this novel is not to be missed. Perfect for lovers of Big Little Lies.” —Library Journal, starred review
"Hepworth deftly keeps the reader turning pages and looking for clues, all the while building multilayered characters and carefully doling out bits of their motivations." —Booklist
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
You may think you’ve already heard the craziest mother-in-law stories, but this novel might just take the cake. It’s the story of Lucy Goodwin and her seemingly cool, poised, and charitable MIL, Diana. When Diana’s apparent suicide starts to look more and more like murder, we’re gradually exposed to the shocking and traumatic events that have shaped Lucy and Diana’s beyond-fraught relationship. Sally Hepworth has a gift for nail-biting domestic thrillers: The way she gets into her characters’ heads (not to mention her readers’) is mind-blowing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hepworth (The Family Next Door) takes readers on a suspenseful ride as a family copes with the suspicious suicide of its matriarch. Lucy has never thought her mother-in-law, Diana Goodwin, liked her since they first met a decade earlier. Chapters in the first person from both Diana's and Lucy's perspectives reveal their deepest feelings and desires, highlighting past events such as the day Lucy married Diana's son, Ollie, and Diana's problems with depression after the death of her husband, Tom, moving forward to the time of Diana's apparent suicide. The investigation of the suicide changes dramatically when police learn that Diana didn't have breast cancer, as she had told her family she did. Furthermore, evidence emerges indicating she may have been murdered. Police question Lucy, Ollie, Ollie's sister, Nettie, and her husband, Patrick, about their involvement in the possible murder, and each of them have motives, especially Lucy, given her contentious history with Diana. Hepworth's short, punchy chapters keep the pages quickly turning while effortlessly deepening her characters. Readers will race to the end of this clever novel to find the truth.
Customer Reviews
Easy read
Story of family love, trials and tribulations. Not a complete surprise but kept me interested from beginning to end.
Great!
Great!!
The Mother -in-Law
This was an excellent read. There weren't too many characters to keep track of, and each character was well developed, even if it was through someone else's eyes. The story evolved with a good pace and when I had to put it down, I thought about the characters and their personalities. It came to a sad but logical end, and I would recommend this to my reading friends.