ALL THE OTHER MOTHERS HATE ME

A former girl-band singer adrift in her life and career gets drawn into a missing persons case involving the “little shit” who’s been bullying her 10-year-old son in this debut novel.

Florence Grimes isn’t like the other mothers at St. Angeles, the posh London school her son, Dylan, attends. A divorcée and almost–pop star from Florida, she runs an online balloon delivery service and dreams of making a Mariah Carey–style comeback. Her going-nowhere-fast life suddenly gets turned upside down when Alfie Risby, heir to a frozen food fortune and her son’s tormentor, goes missing during a school field trip. Dylan becomes a major person of interest in the investigation that follows; then Florence discovers Alfie’s backpack in Dylan’s room. Horror mounting, she reads one of Alfie’s notebooks and learns that her son has made threats to kill his classmate. Readers are quickly pulled into the escalating drama by the sharp-tongued Florence, whose observations about the glossy St. Angeles “school mums” and their “anorexic whippet dog[s],” cheating husbands, and endless games of social one-upmanship are as unsparing as they are hilarious. Her commitment to protecting Dylan becomes the catalyst for her evolution into an amateur sleuth who stumbles across secrets so explosive they transform her and her son’s lives forever. Sly red herrings and surprise reveals are par for the course in this tightly plotted story that, while it satirizes the British obsessions with appearance and class, also celebrates the power of personal redemption through love.

A smart, page-turning suspense novel debut.