Sunday, July 10, 2022

A Mother's Secret by Tess Stimson

 


Most people would think Maddie has the perfect life.  She has a strong marriage to Lucas, something she never thought she would find after her first husband died.  She has three lovely children, a daughter from her first marriage, a toddler son and now a newborn baby.  Maddie has another love.  She runs a horse sanctuary and it is a refuge for her as well as the horses, giving her an outlet and a place to go when she needs to have peace.

But there are issues underneath the picture.  Maddie has been having blackouts.  She will be cooking supper and then find herself in the car driving the kids to school or day care with no memory of getting into the car.  They are getting more frequent but she doesn't want to tell Lucas or her doctor about them.  She had postpartum depression after her first son's birth and she fears that if she tells she could be institutionalized.  

Then the worst happens.  Maddie wakes up one morning realizing she has slept through the night.  Usually the baby keeps her up, as he has colic and cries for hours.  When she goes to check on him, she finds him in the crib cold.  How could this be?  Worse, the doctors and police believe that his death is not just a crib death but that he has been injured.  They suspect Maddie as Lucas had been out of town on a business trip.  Maddie knows she would never hurt her children but if not her, who?  Did the daycare workers shake him one day?  Was it Lucas' sister Candance who had stopped by and gone into the baby's room to see him?  Or her worst fear, was it her during a blackout?

Tess Stimson has written a psychological novel that explores the secrets all of us keep from others.  Maddie has issues that as she explores her background, go back all the way to her birth, secrets that were kept from her.  She wonders who she can trust and if anything she believed was true.  This book is recommended for psychological suspense readers.

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