WHEREVER SHE GOES

In a floundering marriage, a mother tries to balance her daughter’s needs with those of a child she’s met only once.

The past casts a long shadow over Aubrey Finch. Her mother died in a car crash when she was a child, and her father, a longtime victim of PTSD, took his own life when she was a teenager. The crimes she committed to survive after his death are memories she shares with no one, not even her attorney husband, Paul. Bree struggles to be the best mother she can be to 3-year-old Charlotte, although she constantly reminds herself that she’s not chic enough, savvy enough, or just plain good enough for her daughter. When she finally realizes she can never tell Paul about her past, she suggests a separation, leaving Charlotte in the family home and seeing her only on weekends. During one of these cherished visits, she takes Charlotte to the park, where she plays with a boy while Bree talks to his very young mother. A few days later, in the same park, she sees the boy lured into a SUV. She reports the abduction to the police, but as the days pass and no one reports a missing child, they start to treat her as an attention-seeking crank. An experienced hacker, Bree has the computer skills to search for the child on her own. But every step she takes to investigate the disappearance of a child whose name she doesn’t even know risks the chance that Paul will find out enough about her past to make him withdraw the privilege of seeing her own daughter.

Readers who can make it past the heroine’s unrelenting self-flagellation that Armstrong (Watcher in the Woods, 2019, etc.) tosses into the early chapters will enjoy a tense thriller with a quirky romantic twist.