The Good Son

Best-seller Mitchard (The Deep End of the Ocean, the inaugural pick for Oprah’s book club) sets the tone for her suspenseful new novel with its opening line: “I was picking my son up at the prison gates when I spotted the mother of the girl he had murdered.” Thea tells the story, past and present, of her son Stefan and how he killed his beloved girlfriend Belinda. Belinda’s mother, Jill, had been a close friend of Thea’s, until the murder shattered multiple lives. As Stefan and Thea try to move forward, they’re hassled by violent protestors and viciously stalked. The novel takes on a tinge of mystery when Thea starts getting strange phone calls from a young woman who “knows everything” about the night of the murder and says to tell Stefan “I’m sorry.” Who is this caller, and what does she know? And what happened that awful night? Mitchard’s emotional yet precise writing sets readers firmly in the story, amid the Wisconsin weather and the characters, from Thea’s calm football coach husband to her not-so-sympathetic colleagues at the university where she teaches.