I have been a fan of T. M. Logan for a few years now and just love his books. I tend to read books by mainly women authors, for some reason, but I buy and read Tim’s books a lot and often say he is my favourite male writer. He has a really special quality to his writing and is one of the authors that I will buy everything he writes, without even needing to read the blurb. If it’s a T. M. Logan, it’ll be good!
So I was excited to read his 2023 hardback release of The Mother.
The book begins in September 2023 at a church funeral. After this short prologue, we jump back to July 2013. Written in the first person, we read about a woman called Heather Vernon who is 33, a wife to Liam (36) and a mother of two young sons – Theo (4) and Finn (2). They live in Bath.
Heather is feeling their marriage isn’t going as well as she wants it to. They are both busy at work – she’s a Human Resources Manager – but now Liam is an MP, he’s away even more and spends less and less time with her and their sons.
They have a big argument one night, she goes to bed and he sleeps on the sofa. In the morning, she finds him dead, but what happened?
The novel moves between 2013 and 2023, as we try to piece the events together. Heather is jailed for her husband’s murder, yet protests her innocence. What really went on that night?
In the present-day chapters, her sons have grown up and she has missed spending all that time with them – a whole decade. Theo is fourteen now and Finn thirteen. As a mother myself, I could really sympathise with how much she wants to see them again and how frustrating it is that the legal system makes this so difficult.
She meets up with a guy called Owen Tanner who wrote an article supporting her some years before and together, they try to work out what actually happened, because Heather is adamant she didn’t kill her husband. I loved Owen’s character, you aren’t quite sure about him, but he’s fascinating and you want to know more. By this time, you are completely on Heather’s side and fervently hoping she’ll be proved innocent and retain custody of her sons. I liked Jodie too and how she helps Heather, despite her own problems.
As with all this author’s books I have read, you’re straight into the action and want to know what happened. I immediately sympathised with busy mum Heather and wanted to solve the mystery about Liam’s murder. The chapters are a good size, so you just want to move on to the next chapter and discover more. It’s one of those books where you wish you had a long train journey or a weekend with nothing else to do but read. You want to say “Go away, real life! I’m busy reading!”
T. M. Logan’s books are perfectly paced – they never become dull and never whizz off so fast that you can’t keep up. You keep turning the pages to find more answers, but – like the best books – you just find more questions. Your own theories on what happened to Liam on that night, and why, keep changing as you find out more, little by little. You become a detective yourself, trying to piece together the clues.
As Heather’s voice is the one we hear through the first-person narration, she is the character we feel most sympathy for and it’s so easy to hook on to that voice and go on that journey with her. We feel her frustration, her anger at being jailed for a crime she didn’t do, her sadness at missing her sons. Yet, we can also detach as the reader and question her story. Is she really innocent? If she is, who killed Liam and why?
I can find little to criticise about this book, or the author’s writing at all. It’s beautifully written, perfectly crafted and T. M. Logan is the master of “Show, not tell.” His descriptions of people really do say so much and you automatically have an opinion of someone from these beautiful observations, without him having to spell it out. Everything feels authentic, you are pulled into the story and nestle at the heart of the characters all the way through.
The Mother is an absolute triumph of a book!
The unmissable up-all-night thriller from the million-copy bestselling author of NETFLIX hit THE HOLIDAY
THE MOTHER
By T.M. Logan
Master of the up-all-night thriller
Publishing in Hardback, eBook, and Audio from Zaffre on 2nd March 2023
Framed for murder. Now she’s free . . .
A woman attends a funeral, standing in the shadows and watching in agony as her sons grieve. But she is unable to comfort them – or reveal her secret.
A decade earlier, Heather gets her children ready for bed and awaits the return of her husband Liam, little realising that this is the last night they will spend together as a family. Because tomorrow she will be accused of Liam’s murder.
Ten years ago Heather lost everything. Now she will stop at nothing to clear her name – and to get her children back.
Praise for T.M. Logan
‘The king of the fast-paced thriller is back! A book that demands to be read in one sitting.’ Good Housekeeping
‘The author of the excellent The Catch again shows us how to grab a reader by the throat from the off. A really excellent story.’ Sunday Sport
‘Twists, turns and an absolutely belting plot. Coined as thriller of the year, this is the thriller of the decade.’ My Weekly
… cont
‘We raced through this gripping thriller in two big bites.’ Heat Magazine, Read of the Week
‘One of the most exciting authors currently writing for the ever-busy crime thriller market, T.M. Logan is back with another of his ingeniously imagined and perfectly executed plots, and this one is guaranteed to blow your mind!’ Lancashire Evening Post
‘A hugely entertaining, twisting, propulsive thrill-ride from the consistently brilliant T.M. Logan’ Chris Whitaker, bestselling author of We Begin at the End
‘Tense, tight and totally absorbing’ Adele Parks
‘Assured, compelling, and hypnotically readable – with a twist at the end I guarantee you won’t
see coming’ Lee Child
‘Smart, intense, and with a humdinger of a mid-point twist. I loved it’ Gillian McAllister
T.M. Logan is a Sunday Times bestseller whose thrillers have sold more than 1 million copies in the UK and are publish ed in 18 countries around the world. The Holiday was a Richard and Judy Book Club pick and will soon be a major TV drama. Formerly a national newspaper journalist, he now writes full time and lives in Nottinghamshire with his wife and two children. Follow him on Twitter @TMLoganAuthorFollow him on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram
Notes to editors:
- T.M Logan’s thrillers have sold more than 1 million copies in the UK and are published in 18 countries around the world
- The Holiday wassummer 2019’s biggest breakout crime novel. ARichard and Judy pick,it spent 10 weeks in the Sunday Times top 10
- Logan’s debut thriller Lies was a blockbuster bestseller, one of the top ebooks of 2017, netting over 300,000 copies across all formats
- 29 Seconds was longlisted for theSpecsaver National Book Awards 2018
- Logan is the master of the up-all-night thriller – books about ordinary people facing the most terrible dilemmas, depicting real life with that thriller twist, set to keep you up all night
- The Holiday was recently adapted into a major TV drama on Netflix by Trevor Eve’s Projector Pictureswith writer Michael Crompton (Silent Witness)
- Logan’s previous novel The Curfew was an instant Sunday Times bestseller
- His thriller The Catch is also now being filmed for TV
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