The Mother-in-Law

From the day they met, Lucy knew she and her mother-in-law would never be close. Diana Goodwin was gracious, generous and endlessly admired — a wealthy pillar of the community who gave her time and money to women in need, yet held her son's wife at a cool, deliberate distance. Lucy had longed for the warmth of a mother figure; Diana offered courtesy instead of love, and never explained why.

Then Diana is found dead. She has left a note saying she could no longer live with a diagnosis of cancer — but the autopsy finds no cancer at all, and signs that point to murder. Suddenly every member of the polished Goodwin family has something to account for, and the secrets they have kept from one another begin to surface.

Moving between past and present, and narrated by both Lucy and Diana herself, The Mother-in-Law is a sharp, compassionate novel about the fraught bond between the women a family brings together. Sally Hepworth builds a genuine murder mystery on a foundation of real feeling — money and inheritance, motherhood and its disappointments, and how easily love and resentment can wear the same face.