Just What Kind of Mother Are You?

Starred review from July 22, 2013
A distinctive voice, masterful plotting, and pitch-perfect characterizations mark British author Daly’s superb debut. Set in the Lake District, where history coexists with economic hardship, the story revolves around two mothers of teenage girls. Perpetually stretched by obligations to family and work, Lisa Kallisto knows she’s partly to blame when Lucinda, the daughter of her friend Kate Riverty, is abducted. Had Lisa properly followed up on the girl’s sleep-over plans with her own daughter, Lucinda’s absence would have been discovered a day earlier. As Det. Constable Joanne Aspinall compares the disappearance to a series of similar unsolved crimes, Lisa battles her self-doubt and tries to save the enviably perfect Kate from crumbling. Daly’s detailed, richly imagined world and surprising plot twists bring fresh life to the familiar theme of child abduction. In the end, the novel is not just an intriguing puzzle but also a nuanced exploration of friendship, motherhood, fallibility, and the mystery of human relationships. Agent: Jane Gregory, Gregory & Company (U,K.).

July 15, 2013
Daly's debut novel explores how interpersonal relationships wax and wane following the disappearance of a local child. Lisa Kallisto is one of those overworked, overscheduled mothers who never secure enough sleep at night. After getting her three kids off to school, working all day as the manager of a charitable animal shelter and taking care of her household, she's lucky to get a few minutes to herself. So when her daughter's friend Lucinda turns up missing after she was supposed to spend the night at Lisa's home, Lisa is full of blame and self-loathing. And she's not the only one who finds herself at fault: Most of Lucinda's family, the police and even her own husband, Joe, think Lisa should have paid more attention to what the two young teens were doing. Now, it looks like the kidnapper, who has already abducted one other girl, is at it again, and Lisa is trying to put the pieces together. So is Joanne Aspinall, an investigator with the local police in the small English town where both Lisa's and Lucinda's families live, and Joanne's finding that things are growing more and more curious as the pieces to the puzzle refuse to fit together. Daly has a nice writing style: It's casual, readable and full of natural-sounding dialogue. Readers will like Lisa, the protagonist, but most likely be puzzled at her insistence (and that of others around her) that it's all her fault. That hole in the basic premise doesn't constitute a fatal flaw, but if Daly really wanted Lisa to have her hands dirty, she could have made her part in the proceedings stronger. As it is, readers may find themselves puzzled over the degree of angst and self-recrimination that hovers around Lisa throughout the book. And Joanne, although likable, comes off as weak and sports an irritating habit of turning her phone off, meaning she misses vital calls. The characters and motivations lack balance, but the storytelling and Daly's voice are top-drawer.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from August 1, 2013
Skillfully working both sides of the streetcrime fiction and women's fictiondebut novelist Daly delivers a highly suspenseful tale by way of a harried housewife. Exhausted from working full-time at the local animal shelter while raising three children, Lisa Kallisto, who lives in an idyllic village in the Lake District, overlooks the fact that her daughter's best friend, Lucinda, never arrived for a sleepover. To make matters worse, Lucinda's parents are a very wealthy power couple who bring out all of Lisa's insecurities over her family's financial struggles. By the time it's discovered that Lucinda has gone missing, a whole day has gone by. And her disappearance has come two weeks after another girl was kidnapped, drugged, raped, stripped bare, and left in the freezing rain. Told from three viewpoints, including those of the cold-blooded kidnapper and the highly competent female police detective, this intriguing blend of suspense tale and domestic drama, which has a number of delicious plot twists, will keep readers riveted. Not only is Lisa, who may be flawed but has a lot of heart, entirely relatable, but there is also much insight here into the power games that rule both female friendships and the relationships between husbands and wives. First-rate fiction from an outstanding new thriller writer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)