Wasn’t sure what I was getting into when I started A Mother Always Knows, but I really enjoyed it. I’m always attracted to cult stories, and this one was both tragic and hopeful, with some much needed humor thrown in.
Stella spent her early years in a “cult”, until her mother was murdered. Now the story is back in the news, and just as Stella feared, the cult is looking for her. Or are they? Who can she really trust?

A twisting cold-case murder mystery with a splash of cultism for flavor.

Raised by her mother in a backwoods cult, Stella O’Neill has tried to put her childhood behind her. Even now, she has nightmares about the night she found her mother violently murdered in the woods, of the man in the antlers she saw near her mother’s corpse. In the present day, Stella’s mundane life is disrupted when she receives an email telling her that her time may be running out. Now Stella is on the run from the cultists who raised her while trying to uncover just what happened the night she found her mother murdered.

Meanwhile, Priti, a former runway model and now wife to one Ben Winslow, starts to uncover secrets that her husband may not be who he pretends to be. Twenty years ago, Ben was seen arguing with Rose Santos on the night she was murdered. Now, he claims to be wining and dining new potential investors while instead he’s in another state trying to contact Stella O’Neill.

Interspersed with Rose’s actions the night leading up to her murder, A Mother Always Knows follows Stella and Priti as they work to uncover their family’s secrets while trying not to be the story’s next victim.

A Mother Always Knows is a nice take on the traditional murder mystery format. There’s a lot of moving pieces to this story that, for the most part, Sarah Strohmeyer handled deftly. The book throws a lot of information at the reader constantly, and it’s up to the reader to piece them together. The pacing is well done; nothing felt superfluous, and I was constantly waiting on the next big reveal.

I appreciated the use of Rose’s chapters to really lay out the atmosphere and inner workings of the cult. This allowed Stella to have the foggy memory that comes with childhood while still giving the reader the much needed detail and context around Rose’s actions and Stella’s apprehensions. They also give a of humanity to Rose and better justify her actions both in joining the cult and wanting to leave it.

Stohmeyer did fantastic work in keeping the novel twisting and the atmosphere uncertain. When Stella’s paranoia starts setting in later in the book, I felt that with her. I, too, wondered who could be trusted and who couldn’t. I kept anticipating new forks in the road; this novel really takes to heart the idea that things aren’t always what they seem.

My only real criticism of this book is that because there were so many moving pieces, some of them were dropped. While there’s a couple of continuity errors, there are two that really bothered me and kept this from being a five-star read for me.

Characters are allowed to make bad decisions, but these ones weren’t even logical.

Overall, a solid four star book for me. It's interesting and fast-paced with a solid atmosphere. A Mother Always Knows is definitely a fun read, especially if you're into the murder mystery genre, and sometimes fun is all that really matters anyway.

This book was very trite. Everything about the plot felt very overdone and unimaginative. It was not my cup of tea.