The Mother-in-Law

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. (Apr.)