Sister Dear by Hannah Mary McKinnon

Sister Dear by Hannah Mary McKinnon
Published by MIRA ISBN 9780778309550
Trade paperback, $16.99, 368 pages

I've never read a Hannah Mary McKinnon book so I wasn't sure what to expect. Her latest, Sister Dear, is a psychological suspense novel that has a crackerjack ending that shocked me. (And I'm not easily shocked.)

As the story opens, Eleanor is visiting her beloved father at his hospice. When she arrives, she hears her estranged mother, trying to get her ex-husband to leave all his money in his will to their younger daughter Amy because, after all, Eleanor is not his real daughter.

After Eleanor confronts her parents, she runs out of the hospice and ends up getting attacked by a mugger outside her apartment building. Her handsome upstairs neighbor Lewis rescues her, but she is seriously injured enough to end up in the hospital.

While there, her father passes away and Eleanor is bereft. Her mother and sister are allied against her as they have always been, and Eleanor feels like she has no one.

She finds out that her biological father is a highpowered real estate developer, a man her mother worked for years ago. Eleanor confronts him, and he tells her that he never wanted to have anything to do with her and still doesn't. He threatens her if she comes near his family.

But Eleanor's curiosity gets the better of her. She follows Victoria, her father's only child, to a restaurant, and listens in on her conversation with Victoria's mother and cousin.

Victoria is everything Eleanor is not- beautiful, thin, wealthy. She turns heads wherever she goes. Eleanor applies to assist Victoria set up a website for her new company, and the two women become friends, although Victoria has no idea who Eleanor really is. Victoria loves having a new friend, someone she can trust.

As Eleanor insinutates herself into Victoria's life, I wondered where this story would go. Eleanor not only works for Victoria, but also for Victoria's husband. Eleanor's life is getting better- a good job, a boyfriend, she has lost weight, and changed her hairstyle to look more like Victoria. Lewis warns her that the longer this goes on without Victoria knowing who she really is, the harder the fall will be.

Sister Dear kept me interested, but the ending of the story knocked me out of my seat. I literally gasped and nearly screamed out loud. McKinnon takes us on this journey with Eleanor, and where we end up is somewhere we couldn't have guessed. She sprinkles the story with breadcrumbs that lead us to some things we can guess, but the ultimate reveal is a corker.

If you like to be surprised by the ending of a novel, pick up Sister Dear immediately.

Thanks to MIRA for putting me on Hannah Mary McKinnon's tour.

Friday 5ive- May 22, 2020

Welcome to the Friday 5ive, a blog post about five things that caught my attention this week. There seems to be more and more people out and about in NYC as this shelter-in-place continues on. Grocery and drug stores have honed their customer policies and in general people seem to respect the rules. (The exception was last weekend when young people were congregating outside bars at night on the Upper East Side- that was a problem.)

1) We got to spend time with our kids, and one night we played a game called The Contender that my daughter-in-law bought for us all to play. It's a card game similiar to Cards Against Humanity, but geared towards presidential politics. Cards have quotes from presidential candidates, and you have to come up with the best answer from your five cards. What I found interesting was that there were many names of candidates that I was unfamiliar with, and our family follows politics closely. It's a great game for fans of history and politics, entertaining and informative. We had so much fun! (There were a lot of LBJ and Nixon quotes as those two are very quotable.)

2)  While upstate with our kids, we celebrated a belated Mother's Day with a barbeque. The day started with my son's girlfriend making me Avocado Toast and it was so delicious! I can't pick out a ripe avocado to save my life, but she has the knack for choosing the best ones. 

Avocado Toast

For dessert, the kids picked out a wonderful vanilla cake with blueberries and strawberries and whipped cream frosting. They found it at DeCicco & Sons  grocery store. They also picked up some rainbow cookies that were tasty too. My crafty daughter-in-law made me a beautiful card with her Cricut. It's so pretty!

3)  On Wednesday night I watched the concert performance of Bombshell by the cast of the NBC's gone-too-soon show Smash. The show, about the mounting of the Broadway show Bombshell based on the life of Marilyn Monroe, ran for two seasons in 2012. In 2015, a concert performance of Bombshell, with the original cast was held in NYC and that was streamed last night as a benefit for The Actors' Fund. The performers, including Katherine McPhee, Megan Hilty, Christian Borle, Brian d'Arcy James, and Leslie Odom Jr. are amazing. Watch it here for a limited time.

4) The Book Expo that was scheduled for this week was cancelled this year due to COVID-19. One of the opening events is the Editors' Book Buzz, where a selection of editors share one of the books they are most excited about publishing. Cameron Esposito hosted a Zoom event on Wednesday with six editors and it worked wonderfully. Usually we are in a packed room with hundreds of people and it is difficult to hear, but on Zoom, we could see each editor clearly and up close as we listened to them talk about books. I loved the format! I will post about the event next week, and every book there has been added to my TBR list.

5) I'm a big fan of J. Courtney Sullivan's books, and her upcoming novel, Friends and Strangers, is another home run for her. It's about a woman (who with her husband and new baby moves from Brooklyn to a college town community upstate) and the young college student she hires to care for her son while she writes her next book. There is so much in this book- class, economic equality, marriage and family issues- it's fantastic. Fans of Kiley Reid's Such A Fun Age will enjoy it, I liked it even more than Reid's book. A full review will post soon. 

I just started Hannah Mary McKinnon's Sister Dear about a young woman who finds discovers a family secret that sets off a dangerous chain of events. My full review will post on Tuesday. 

I hope you all have a safe, healthy and happy Memorial Day weekend.