LIKE MOTHER, LIKE DAUGHTER by Kimberly McCreight is a gripping emotional thriller that begins with a mother’s disappearance from her Brooklyn home. What’s left behind is a bloody shoe and a daughter who has to untangle the complexities of her family’s lies to find her mother before it's too late.
Cleo’s relationship with her mother has been strained over the past several years. Cleo is a student at NYU, and her mother, Katrina, still intrudes into her life, especially regarding boyfriends. Cleo reluctantly agrees to come home for dinner one night, but when she arrives, her mother is nowhere to be found. The only clue is a bloody shoe. Katrina works at a law firm as a fixer, helping clients deal with the worst situations. She and her husband, Aidan, were recently separated after Aidan’s infidelity. Only their daughter, Cleo, doesn’t know about the separation. Recently, Katrina started receiving threatening texts involving blackmail. Who was sending the texts, and what did they want? Tired of waiting on investigators, Cleo launches her own search and starts to unravel the secrets of her mother’s past and present. Can Cleo find her mother and repair their relationship before it’s too late?
LIKE MOTHER, LIKE DAUGHTER grabs you from the first page and takes you on a suspenseful ride of secrets, lies, deception, and fractured relationships. Each layer of Katrina’s life is peeled back as we learn more about who she is and what she had been experiencing before she went missing. Her personal life is a mess, her work life is dangerous, her past is haunting, and her daughter’s bad choices put her in a vortex of risk. Who harmed Katrina? From big Pharma executives, drug-dealing boyfriends, dating app contacts, a philandering financially desperate husband, or someone from her past? There are enough suspects, twists, and turns to keep your head spinning. Where the needle finally lands is anyone’s guess in this well-written, drama-driven thriller that focuses on a mother-daughter relationship and the lies behind the illusion of a perfect life.
From the New York Times best-selling author of Reconstructing Amelia: A daughter races to uncover her mother's secret life in the wake of her disappearance in this "breathless, shocking thriller." —Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times best-selling author
When Cleo, a student at NYU, arrives late for dinner at her childhood home in Brooklyn, she finds food burning in the oven and no sign of her mother, Kat. Then Cleo discovers her mom’s bloody shoe under the sofa. Something terrible has happened.
But what? The polar opposite of Cleo, whose “out of control” emotions and “unsafe” behavior have created a seemingly unbridgeable rift between mother and daughter, Kat is the essence of Park Slope perfection: a happily married, successful corporate lawyer. Or so Cleo thinks.
Kat has been lying. She’s not just a lawyer; she’s her firm’s fixer. She’s damn good at it, too. Growing up in a dangerous group home taught her how to think fast, stay calm under pressure, and recognize a real threat when she sees one. And in the days leading up her disappearance, Kat has become aware of multiple threats: demands for money from her unfaithful soon-to-be ex-husband; evidence that Cleo has slipped back into a relationship that’s far riskier than she understands; and menacing anonymous messages from her past—all of which she’s kept hidden from Cleo . . .
Like Mother, Like Daughter is a thrilling novel of emotional suspense that questions the damaging fictions we cling to and the hard truths we avoid. Above all, it’s a love story between a mother and a daughter, each determined to save the other before it’s too late.