Review of The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton

Imagine watching your loving, nearly perfect mother stand on the front stairs of your farmhouse, put the baby down behind her and stab a man to death and then act as if this brutal act had little to do with her? You’d probably accept your mother’s explanation of self-defense against a random attack. And so Laurel Nicolson did for fifty years. But now, when her mother is near the end of her life, a chance discovery of a photo and a gnawing sense that she’s been keeping her mother’s secret for too long, lead Laurel to question everything she understood about her family.

At one point in The Secret Keeper I thought, oh, I’ve got this figured out and it’s turning too predictable. Such hubris. I wasn’t close and I can’t talk much about the plot and its many twists, they are too much fun to fall for. In the course of the novel, you’ll explore London during the blitz, family dynamics of the boisterous, lovingly squabbling sort and the violent, dangerous sort, misguided social climbing, mental delusions of the old and young, idyllic English countryside living, artistic talent and how it forms and drives personalities (and scientific talent, actually, now I think about it), wartime mentality and the strange choices people make when living with death all around them. Skilled, detailed character development with gradual revelations lies at the core of this book with a plot that turns out to be much trickier than it appears.