The Mother In Law by Sally Hepworth

In any other family Lucy would have been a very welcomed daughter in law. She was loving, warm and wanted to be part of the family.  She was a good caring wife and mother and I thought that was the main criterion for a mother in law! I was wrong. Diana was cool and collected and she kept Lucy at arms length. She did not dislike her but she was never welcoming either.

Diana and Lucy got on fairly well. You knew where you stood with Diana who had iron clad principles and beliefs. One was that despite being endowed with a lot of money, she was not going to hand out any either to her son or to her daughter, however dire the circumstances were. She had a tough beginning herself and believed that you worked to overcome that. Nothing could shake her from that belief.

When Diana was found dead with a suicide note by her side, the family believed she had cancer and that may have caused her to take her own life. When that fact was disputed with no oncological records at all and when a vial of a drug found to cause slow, painless death was found the unraveling begins.

Unfortunately at the time of Diana's death both her children were in dire need of funds. The son because his partner had run the business down to the ground, they were in debt and everything had to go. Nettie the daughter desperate to have a child, an obssession if you can call it that, failed IVF treatments behind her, now forty and knowing she had to have one more round. Detectives had a good case for suspicion when they ruled out suicide.

In typical Hepworth fashion the story unwinds slowly but surely. You never know who could be the one but you knew it was close to home.

Fascinating read and a real page turner.

Sent to me by Netgalley for an unbiased review, courtesy of St Martin's Press.