Book Review: The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton

Title: The Secret Keeper
Author: Kate Morton
Enjoyment Rating: *****
This book would be rated: PG
Source: Audible for iTunes
Books I've read this year: 125

When Laurel Nicolson is sixteen, she decides to hide from her younger sisters in the family tree house during a birthday party. Just as she's gathering herself to rejoin the party, she spots a man walking up the driveway. Her mother, Dorothy, at the doorway to the house, also sees the man, and when he approaches her mother, Dorothy takes the knife she was holding to cut the birthday cake and plunges it into the man's chest.

Nearly fifty years later, Laurel is a successful actress (along the lines of Helen Mirren, I imagine), who returns home for her mother's ninetieth birthday party. While she's been home many times over the last five decades, this time it's different-- Dorothy is dying and Laurel suddenly feels compelled to figure out the mystery of the man's death. At the time it was written off as self-defense (there was a stalker in the area) and no one in the family ever talked about it again. So Laurel begins her search, and readers are treated to the story of Dorothy's as a young woman in wartime London, along with those of her best friend Vivien and her boyfriend Jimmy.

I'm reluctant to write too much about The Secret Keeper, because I don't want to give away any of the twists of the plot, but I will say that it is a rich, intense, deeply-layered story with fabulous turns of plot and a very satisfying ending. In fact, I think it's probably Morton's best novel so far. 

My only quibble (and I think it's a small one) is that Morton seems to give her historical characters much richer personal lives than her modern characters. In The Secret Keeper, I was interested in Dorothy's life, but I wanted to know more about Laurel and it seemed like she was more of a vehicle in telling her mother's story. I felt the same way with The Distant Hours-- Edie's own story was only significant in it's relationship to her mother. As a result, Morton leaves out the complications of love lives and families and things like that, and the modern characters feel a little flat.