The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton ~ Book Review

When famous British actress Laurel Nicolson was 16 years old, she was witness to a murder of a man on the front steps of her home.  Hiding in the tree house while her little brother's birthday party was going on, Laurel was about to join the cake cutting in the garden when a man came up the drive.  When her sweet, loving mom Dorothy answers the door to find him there, she seems to know him but instead of a welcome she plunges the cake knife into him.  Fifty years later, Laurel is home along with her siblings to celebrate her mother's 90th birthday.  But questions have always lingered about her mother since that fateful day and now her mom is saying things that just don't make sense.   Because Dorothy is in a nursing home and Laurel is staying in the family home, she goes on a hunt to find the answers to the questions that linger.  What she finds will lead her to 1940's London during the blitz and a life her mother has never spoken of.  Instead of answers there seems to be even more questions and a feeling that she has never really known her mother after all.

I loved this story.  It goes back and forth between present day, the 1960's and  1940's England just before and during the London Blitz.  There were several points of view and the author wove them together in such a way that I was never confused.  The story captured me from the very beginning and I found it hard to put it down.  The mystery of Dorothy's past is revealed in such a way that kept the pages turning and it was interesting to try and resolve the Dorothy of the 1960's and the present with the Dorothy of war torn London.  The reader is taken on a journey of three young people who's lives intersect and are forever changed by knowing each other.  Events conspire, both instigated by each of them and those not under their control,  that lead them to make decisions that they might not otherwise and I, as the reader, eagerly turned the pages trying to find the mystery of who this man that was murdered by Dorothy might have been in her past.  Throw in a love story, and the fact that the war might have caused people to do things they might normally have never done and a twist I did not see coming and you end up with a wonderful mystery with great characters that kept the pages turning.  This was one of those rare stories that caused a satisfied sigh to escape when I turned the last page.

I gave it a 10/10.