What a Mother Knows
Michelle Mason wakes up from an 18-month coma to a lawsuit holding her responsible for the death of Noah Butler, a promising young rock star. More disturbingly, nobody will tell her where her teenage daughter, Nikki, is. As she struggles to recover physically—her arm is virtually useless, never mind the Hollywood power-broker look she used to rock—she follows tenuous clues to Nikki, who may have had more of a connection to Noah than Michelle remembers. Michelle’s distance from her husband and son, her contentious relationship with her depressed mother, and her, frankly, bitchy friends inspire sympathy, especially since she is repeatedly stonewalled for information on Nikki. Why isn’t her husband looking for their daughter? Why did he pack up her room, including a memory card that might be the key to the accident? Why was Noah in the car with Michelle on the rainy night of the car accident? Here the elements of Hollywood moviemaking and tabloid hedonism blend nicely with the desperate franticness of, say, S. J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep (2011). --Susan Maguire