Thank you NetGalley and Publisher for this early copy!

I went into this was pleasantry surprised how well-written and suspenseful it was. Kelly did a great job with her characters and keeping you reading until the end. I will be checking out more from this author. I recommend fans of psychological thrillers to check out this new well-crafted one!

What a great atmospheric book this was. The old mental hospital was such a character in and of itself. It thrilled me with it’s eerie and very creepiness and the stories it held within its walls. And as the story goes along and we discover just what did take place there, well it made me find it even darker and scarier than I already did. And I loved every minute of it!

This is one of those books where the setting and the place take just as much credit for the fabulousness of the book. And the characters were so well written, so fleshed out, that I felt like I knew them and was friends with some and definitely not with others.

I highly recommend this book to lovers of psychological suspense, brilliant mysteries and writing that puts you right in the scene and keeps you there for a long time to come. I found this one to be fabulous.

Thank you to NetGalley, Erin Kelly and St Martins Press for the free e-book in exchange for an honest review.

Marianne was just a young woman when she fled her hometown of Nusstead, abandoning her family and her boyfriend at the time Jesse. Now three decades later, she has to return to care for her sick mother and Jesse, who never quite got over her, is threatening to expose the reason she fled. Marianne will do whatever she needs to make sure her daughter never finds out, even if it means making an ally of her worst enemy.

I am not going to lie, the beginning of the book through Marianne’s perspective of the present was slightly disappointing to me because I was often confused by what was going on and why Jesse was such a evil in Marianne’s eyes. The rest of the novel was in the past mostly and it was told from Marianne’s, Jesse’s and Helen’s perspectives and I lapped it up! I really loved that and how we see how their pasts all come together and how different their lives growing up were. We could then see what the motives were for each character in hat happened in the past and that for me was so interesting! I loved the ending and how it all got wrapped up with a neat little bow and how what you really assume is about to happen, actually doesn’t!

Out April 23rd.

"The Victorians used to call their mental hospitals stone mothers. They thought the design of the building could literally nurse the sick back to health."

Erin Kelly is an elegant writer. Her prose is undeniably British, with that lack of melodrama that I enjoy. While I think He Said/She Said was stronger, Stone Mothers is very good. It doesn’t have the narrative hook that HS/SS had, with the alternating stories and unreliable narrators. But what it does have is a dark current running underneath, like a subterranean river about to offer something rotten from its depths.

Told in three parts, Stone Mothers is, at its core, about a decaying town, fighting for its own survival after the gutting of its central hospital. Nusstead reminds me of the Welsh mining communities after Margaret Thatcher destroyed the profession and closed the mines. Utter desolation and desperation. Fractured families. Men left to drink and despair. Women attempting to pick up the pieces. Children running wild, or worse, trying to raise their smaller siblings while their parents dissolve. It’s stark, and realistic, and Nusstead is very much a character in the novel, much like the old asylum, the ‘stone mother’ of titular fame.

It begins when Marianne’s husband buys her a flat. Drawn back to her hometown after her mother develops dementia, Marianne is nonetheless shocked and very much appalled by her husband’s gift. The flat has been converted from the ruins of the old mental hospital in the town, and the dark walls hold memories that Marianne would very much like to forget. When her ex-boyfriend Jesse – emboldened and triggered by her arrival back into his life – threatens to upend the secrets they’ve kept for so long, Marianne feels driven to protect the fragility of her family.

She approaches an old enemy, Helen Greenlaw, she who closed the hospital and sent Nusstead into the realm of miserable towns without a purpose, without a core. Now a peer in the House of Lords, Helen wields more power than ever – except when it comes to what Marianne and Jesse know. Cold and unfeeling, Helen appears ready to do anything to protect her own secrets, perhaps – even kill.

While the action is slow to unfold, the noose that seems to tighten around Marianne is unflinching, and I felt my own throat closing from the tightness of the writing. By the time we hear from Helen and take a dark walk through her past, I was absolutely riveted. There are characters I thought I’d like but ended up loathing, and one particular character that just reached in and wouldn’t let go. Her quintessential Britishness, that stiff upper lip, that survival spirit, the get-up-and-go. The utter tsunami of emotion disguised as cruelty or ennui. God. It tore at my heart.

In the end, Stone Mothers examines the true cost of the choices we make. Even when they seem right, or just, or like they heal an old wrong, there are still consequences, rippling out from that underground river, waiting to be borne into the light.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. I appreciate it!

This novel started off way too slowly for my taste and didn't pick up up until a third of the way in. I think the past story would have been more effectively told if it was interspersed through the narrative. That said, the story was ultimately interesting.

A intense story that started slow for me.,
It was a little hard to follow at first, more than half way through it started to make more sense and became more interesting. I thought it was just ok. I think I’ve read too many similar books lately.

I’m almost afraid to write this review. Stone Mothers, by Erin Kelly, begins as a slow burn before igniting after the first of multiple key twists. I’m worried that I might reveal too much and ruin the whole experience. This book is layered with plot, tension, and secrets. I want to gush about it, but I have to keep some of those secrets for other readers. Because I really hope that this book has a lot of readers. It is one of the best thrillers I’ve read in a long while.

Stone Mothers opens in 2018, when Marianne receives an unpleasant surprise from her loving husband. He has no idea that his purchasing an apartment in Royal Park, Nusstead, would be an unpleasant surprise, even though the place used to be an asylum and someone was murdered there years ago. It’s not the building’s history that worries Marianne—at least, not the history people know from the news. Marianne slowly reveals her past in Nusstead and why she is terror-stricken at the thought of moving back there. The least of it is that being in Nusstead means that she’s much more likely to run into her teenage boyfriend, Jesse. She and Jesse have been holding a secret for decades and it seems that Jesse is starting to wobble.

The second third of Stone Mothers jumps back to 1988, when Marianne was still a teen, Royal Park was still an asylum, and Jesse and his entire family were campaigning against the closure of the asylum. Almost everyone worked at the asylum in one way or another, but the 1980s in England were the home of Thatcherism. Almost anything that receives government funding is on notice for downsizing or closure. The Nusstead Asylum has already been shutdown by the full-steam-ahead Helen Greenlaw, a rising administrator who refuses to hear any argument to reopen the asylum. But when Marianne discovers some old hospital records, purely by accident, that hint at a deadly secret held by Helen, she hatches a plan with Jesse that almost immediately gets out of control.

The last third jumps back even further in time, to 1958, when young Helen Morris was incarcerated at the asylum under terrible circumstances. This section reads almost like a completely different novel. This third, unlike the very-much-a-thriller first two-thirds, is almost Victorian in the way that the asylum is portrayed. That said, this third rejoins the first parts of the novel in spectacular fashion after giving us Helen’s story. The last chapters bring us back to the present. They give us a front row seat to the incredible conclusion of decades of plots.

By the time we learn everyone’s secrets, all of our ideas about who is a hero and who is a villain have been completely turned on their head. I loved every chapter because it took me further down the rabbit hole. In Stone Mothers, secrets are preceded by misunderstandings that are worse than the secrets. This novel is the story of a group of people who make mistakes, then compound them by trying to keep their secrets. Every step they make is perfectly logical; and every step they make is absolutely the wrong thing to do.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

The formatting on my version is completely messed up. Unfortunately I can’t read this even though I tried—it’s too jumbled. Not clear to me if anyone else had this problem. I’d be happy to read and review a version with correct formatting. I enjoyed what I read and am still giving it four stars for the opening chapter, which sucked me in. Too bad the formatting made it impossible to continue (I’m talking random like breaks, no paragraphs, chapter titles randomly appearing in the middle of sentences, numbers randomly appearing in the middle of text. This is no way reflects on the quality of the novel and I’m disappointed not to finish it)

3.5 stars

Secrets: Everyone has them. Some, are best kept hidden!

Nazareth: It’s an eerie place. Creepy, dark and downright scary - it’s not a place I’d ever want to visit.

Marianne and Jess were sweethearts once. Then Marianne ran off. Jesse always believed that he got the short end of the stick. That makes him a desperate man.

Nowadays, Helen Greenlaw is extremely successful - and yet she is always afraid that the walls are going to come crashing down. Meanwhile, Marianne’s husband Sam, has quite the surprise planned, which makes Marianne scared straight.

The ties that bind these three are oh so complicated when the past and the present collide! “Stone Mothers” is novel that features different narrators - with Helen being my favorite as I felt her story was the strongest and found her character to be quite intriguing. Having read a few of Erin Kelly’s novels, I think this was one had a different feel to it than her others - it was slow to start and then it took off, and that was thanks to Helen who stole the show. To be perfectly honest, the creepy, dark atmosphere of this one gave me the chills. I have a feeling that once you take a deep dive into “Stone Mothers” you’ll react the same way!

This was another buddy read with Kaceey!

Thank you to Allison Ziegler at Minotaur Books and to Erin Kelley for an arc of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Published on Goodreads on 3.24.19.
Will be published on Amazon on 4.23.19.

I hate it when I do not really enjoy a book and have to post an honest review. The last thing I want is to hurt anyone's feelings. But I did not really like this book. Which is disappointing since I really enjoyed her last book. It was very slow and unlike her other book, no dramatic twist at the end to wrap it all up for you. So, my apologies to the author. But this is just my opinion, I am sure other people will read it and love it. You make the call.

Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to review Stone Mothers. I loved the synopsis of this story so I jumped on it. Sadly, I found it so slow and hard to get into. Some characters seemed underdeveloped for my taste and the ending left me wanting more. While this is the first book by Erin Kelly I have read, I had heard many positive things about her other books so wanted to give this one a try. Sadly, it fell a little short. A story about an insane asylum and blackmail, it had all the promises of a great read.

Thank you Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. I was so excited to receive this one, because I loved Erin Kelly’s He Said/She Said. Unfortunately, this one did not really work for me.

I loved the premise of the book, and learning so much about the sad state of how mental illness was treated was so interesting. The characters were all complex and multi-dimensional.

But the pacing, to me, was off. The book really dragged at times and didn’t read fluidly. There were some things that didn’t seem to fit or make sense. And the ending was unsatisfying and almost confusing to me.

I seem to be in the minority based on the reviews, and I definitely think Kelly is an incredibly talented writer and most will really like this one. It just wasn’t for me.

This book is very well written. It pulled me in almost right away and kept me interested until the very end. I will definitely be recommending this to the customers at my work!

Thank you to Netgalley, the author, and the publisher for this ARC.

Erin Kelly does it again. What a deep, dark, muddy thriller. So well written, deeply felt and wonderfully gothic. I loved the characters, I loved the history and the grit. I fell so hard for He Said/She Said and this one was just as good. A turbulent first love, dark secrets and fragile characters. I highly recommend this one.

I was super excited to read this book. I loved the synopsis and the title. I mean Hello Stone Mothers. That in itself sucked me in. This is my first Emily Kelly read. I was a little disappointed because I was waiting for the big Ooooh moment and it wasn't there for me. This read was also very slow and I felt myself losing interest in the story. I am on the fence of a 2 star rating and 3 star rating...so I am going with a 2.5

Can three keep a secret? Over the course of 30 years we find out how difficult that is. While the story centers around an old insane asylum, we are introduced to three families who are inextricably tied to this place of ruin. What price insanity and who gets to decide?

Not a psychological thriller but more of a domestic drama. Three and a half stars.

Marianne and Jesse are teenagers in love. They live in a small town that had an economy based on employment at the "insane asylum". After the hospital closes, many of the townspeople have been left without a way to make a decent living. Jesse and Marianne spend their days wandering around the facility when they find out a secret about someone that had been hospitalized years ago - someone in power. They decide to blackmail this person, which leads to many other consequences that changes their lives.
This book goes back and forth from the different character's perspectives and it also goes back in time to the 1950's when mental health was treated much differently than today and women especially had a tough time.
If you are a Kelly fan, I think this is a different kind of book than her usual fare. There's not really much "mystery" here, and the last half of the book was really my favorite. Helen's story was riveting and heartbreaking. Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy in exchange for a review.

Stone Mothers is a well written, expertly structured, compelling read. The author has a flair for writing that I have never seen before which draws me to her stories. I very much recommend this novel, I was dedicated to it from page one all the way to the end, and I was anxiously flipping the pages. If you enjoy character driven plots with intriguing characters then I say give this book a try!

Stone Mother's examines the thin line between the past and our future. As hard as Marianne fought to escape her past and all of the terror that comes with it, the past does not want to stay hidden. Forever tied to her past love and the secrets they hold together, Marianne struggles to fight the walls that seem to be shrinking around her.
It took me a little while to get into the bok and connect with all of the characters, but once I was hooked the second half of the book flew by. Recommended for anyone who enjoys reading a psychological suspense.

*I received an advanced reader's copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Wow. This book was incredible, there was never any guessing as to what happened next and when you think you know something you are way off base. This book really kept me thinking, I was even thinking about it those times I’d have to set it down and get my day to day activities done (trust me it was difficult) I would recommend this book to anyone that wants an excellent read where the full plot is not laid out for you from the get go.

The book is in several different parts, each from the view of a different character throughout a significant time period. I absolutely loved how it was laid out as each character had their own section but it just continued the story already laid out and even when it was further back in time you already and the info for the pieces to fit.