Kate Morton's The Secret Keeper

Kate Morton’s newest novel, The Secret Keeper, was a masterpiece. I absolutely loved it and want to recommend The Secret Keeper, as well as Kate Morton’s previous novels, as must reads. The novel starts out feeling a little cut up but as you start piecing the scenes together you get so involved in the story that is unfolding before you that you cannot put the book down, or at least I could not- even a few times when I was getting mad at the characters! I really enjoyed how Morton chose to introduce us to the characters and players in the story as well as how she plotted out her mystery. Kate Morton is a master at telling a tale through levels and over decades.

The Secret Keeper starts in present day London with a dying woman and her grown up children visiting her. The eldest child recalls a violent memory of her childhood and from there the novel rolls out a suspense filled mystery. We see the sleuthing of a couple of the grown kids, Laurel and her brother, in present day piecing together their mothers past. Laurel is chasing the threads of the story and trying to unravel the mystery of her mother, who she was and is, and what kind of person she is. Then the reader is thrown back in time to the mother as a teenager and older. The story unfolds for us as if it were happening for the first time and we experience the love, tragedy, greed, selfishness, despair, and joy as their mother experienced it during war ridden London in the 1940’s. The stories work in tandem, filling in holes, swelling mundane articles of information found in the present with the feelings of the past, and painting a beautiful historical mystery. I was enthralled from the first chapter and could not wait to find out what Laurel and her brother would discover.

Kate Morton is a must read for anyone interested in mysteries, historical fiction, family intrigue, or novels that toggle between present day and the past to untangle tales.