The Wrong Mother - Charlotte Duckworth

 You know, I almost get nervous when I start a book by Charlotte Duckworth because I know I’m going to get tummy squirmy. I’ve read all her books. I always think to myself, no, she can’t do it again, she can’t possibly produce another twisty, turny tale but she does. Every time! And I think that every time I review her books, I say that! But, as ever, it’s always difficult to review a psychological thriller because I don’t want to give anything away. So let’s begin with a little blurb.

‘Faye is 39 and single. She’s terrified she may never have the one thing she always wanted: a child of her own.

Then she discovers a co parenting app: Acorns. For men and women, who want to have a baby, but don’t want to do it alone. When she meets Louis through it, it feels as though the fates have aligned.

But just one year later, Faye is on the run from Louis, with baby Jake in tow. In desperate need of a new place to live, she contacts Rachel, who is renting out a room in her remote Norfolk cottage. It’s all Faye can afford – and surely she’ll be safe there?

But is Rachel the benevolent landlady she pretends to be?

Or does she have a secret of her own?’

Almost from page one with an enigmatic prologue, you find yourself slightly off-balance instinctively knowing that nothing is as it really seems. You know that Faye has some issues, but you’re not quite sure what and you’re not quite sure whether she is the one off centre or whether it’s the rest of the world! Louis is not likeable at all, my hackles rose quite soon after he entered the proceedings.so that made me more pro Faye, although I wanted to shake her sometimes, because it seems she couldn’t see the obvious. And Rachel is a brilliant character, because somehow you want to endow her with all kinds of qualities that may or may not be so. You want to accuse her of all kinds of things that she may or may not have done. She’s a cleverly constructed character and her final denouement is masterful. But until that point, there’s almost something of the Mrs Danvers about her. 

It’s immensely compulsive reading, sub plots alongside a main plot. And all the time there’s this sense of nothing being quite right, that is quite unnerving as you read. But a story like this wouldn’t work unless the narrative was correctly paced, and it’s nigh on perfect here. And with any psychological thriller, you know that the narrators will be flawed. How flawed though? The story yo-yos between Rachel and Faye’s perspectives, but who can you believe?  Interestingly, we never get Louis’s perspective.

As long as Charlotte Duckworth writes these thrillers, I will read them! My thanks to Ella Patel at Quercus books for a gifted copy, and the opportunity to share my thoughts on publication day.