Irish television personality Norton ( Holding, 2017, etc.) has crafted what turns out to be an ominous mystery for his second novel as two stories about motherhood unfurl simultaneously. In the present moment, Elizabeth’s life also becomes uncertain as she discovers Zach is lying about visiting his father and keeping secrets of his own. These sections become increasingly tense as Patricia visits his home and glimpses the sadness and dysfunction that grip him and his mother. Interspersed with the chapters about Elizabeth’s questions, other chapters flash back to detail Patricia’s initial correspondence and later relationship with Edward. To complicate matters, her mother’s lawyer informs Elizabeth that she has inherited a second property, her father’s house, which prompts a new round of investigation. Nearly all grown children realize this truth at some point, and yet it hits Elizabeth at an especially timely moment, as she’s a single mother to her son, Zach, who is nearing adulthood, and she faces a life just as alone as she perceived her mother's to be. She discovers a box of letters from Edward Foley, the father she never met and whom she was told had died when she was an infant, and realizes she has little idea who Patricia was outside her role as a mother. University professor Elizabeth Keane flies to Ireland to clean out her mother Patricia’s house in Buncarragh and ready it for sale. A daughter discovers layers of secrets surrounding her parentage when she returns to Ireland to settle her mother’s estate.

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