Mother's Day

Thirteen-year-old Jenny Newhall is a normal adolescent: bright, big-hearted and snappish to her adoptive mother. Jenny's birth mother, teenager Linda Emery, hid her pregnancy and disappeared from her home in Massachusetts, leaving grieving relatives to assume she had been killed. Now, when Linda shows up unannounced on the Newhall's doorstep on Mother's Day, skeletons clatter from closets all over town, and soon Linda's bloodied body turns up in a dumpster. Suspicion points to Jenny's adoptive father, Greg, who evades arrest and goes underground, trying to unravel clues that could make his family whole again. The police investigation headed by laconic loner Walter Ference exposes infidelity, sexual extortion and the key to an earlier murder. MacDonald, an Edgar award nominee for The Unforgiven , digs with relish into the town's secrets and its stockpile of hot emotions--betrayal, rejection, anger, jealousy and unrequited lust--pushing the buttons that titillate readers but failing to cohere into a focused narrative. The suspense she generates is disappointingly stop-and-go, loosening its hold too quickly after each revelation and falling away into mundane details. (Mar.)