Mother Made Me

It was almost midday on the second day of our trip by the time I started feeling truly murderous towards Mother.

For sixty-year-old crime writer Pat, her mother's relentless cruelty and self-obsession have cast a long shadow over her life. Words are Pat's gift, but Mother's weapon, and Pat is reaching breaking point. She's afraid of what she might do.

And then, suddenly, Mother is gone. The spell is lifted and Pat's life is transformed. Graham, her devoted former lover, re-enters her life, and Cynthia, the sister Pat never knew she had, appears from nowhere. But things aren't quite right. Graham is holding his cards suspiciously close to his chest and Cynthia remains mysterious, and bears an unsettling resemblance to Mother herself.

Desperate to make sense of the shifting ground beneath her, Pat begins to write a memoir, trying to untangle her own voice from the insistent echo of her mother's. But in a world where everyone is carrying secrets, and no one is telling the whole story, how can she hope to get close to the truth? Words are weapons, and Mother seems to be having the last word even now . . .

Sharp as a knife and impossibly stylish, Mother Made Me is a game of hidden truths. This is not a whodunit, it's a who-knows-whodunit.