“Once she was born I was never not afraid.”

Any parent who has been blessed with that moment when you hold your newborn in your arms for the first time can understand the above quote from the great Joan Didion, which Kimberly McCreight uses to preface her terrific new novel, LIKE MOTHER, LIKE DAUGHTER. Katrina McHugh understood this feeling as soon as she held her daughter, Cleo, against her bare chest.

Cleo is now a student at NYU, and Kat works as a fixer at a midtown law firm with high-profile corporate clients. Cleo’s father, Aiden, is a struggling documentary filmmaker and is now separated from Kat due to his extramarital philandering, which Cleo is not aware of initially. Cleo and Kat’s relationship has evolved over the years and is currently at a more adversarial stage, especially since Kat heavily disapproves of Cleo’s drug-dealer boyfriend, Kyle.

"Kimberly McCreight expertly layers this story with plot twist after plot twist.... [She] dares readers not to get emotionally invested in these characters straight through to the startling conclusion."

Their home is a gorgeous Park Slope brownstone, and Cleo is standing outside of it moments before the agreed-upon time she's to visit her mother. Kat has left a few fairly urgent texts, and it sounds like she has something very important to share. When Cleo enters the apartment, she smells smoke. The oven has been left on, and Kat is nowhere to be found. Cleo does find one of Kat’s shoes in what appears to be a pool of blood. She rushes to the neighbors, the stately Janine and her college-age daughter, Annie, who years earlier had been close with Cleo. From there, she phones her father and the police.

What transpires from here is a look into the recent past, as well as the continuation of the present narrative, told in alternating chapters from the points of view of both Kat and Cleo. Each chapter lends more and more characters and potential motives to Kat’s disappearance, and it quickly turns into a whodunit worthy of a great murder mystery tale.

It is important to note that Kat could’ve made some high-profile enemies in her line of work. This becomes especially relevant when she starts dating Doug Sinclair from her client company, Darden Pharmaceuticals. Doug is killed one night in a tragic car accident. He was on his way to meet with his boss, who was concerned that he might be turning over information about a highly sensitive product that was implicated in the deaths of several unborn children.

It doesn’t end there, as Kimberly McCreight expertly layers this story with plot twist after plot twist. LIKE MOTHER, LIKE DAUGHTER goes beyond your standard domestic thriller, peeling back the layers of the complex relationship that exists between a mother and her child. McCreight dares readers not to get emotionally invested in these characters straight through to the startling conclusion.