This is the bizarre but true story of the couple who fled to Hawaii when authorities were demanding that they produce the two children that were in their care. It was on the news quite a bit, and I was curious to read this book to see if it has more information about the story. The strange doomsday beliefs were hard to fathom and when it came out that there were several deaths around this pair, Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell, things got even stranger. I’m glad they finally got caught and the truth will all eventually come out, I hope. You can’t help but feel for the two kids whose disappearance triggered the investigation, Tylee and JJ. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Free ARC from Net Galley.

TERRIBLE CRIME, but wonderful story?

Just sad all around with greed, death, crazy religion and innocent kids. Layers upon layers in great detail, worth your time since it has been largely forgotten in the so-called pandemic. READ THIS book carefully and hug your kids and clean our hearts!!

I am always fascinated with the psychology behind the crime, and what makes people commit heinous acts. This book goes behind the scenes describing the lives of Lori and Chad and how that led up the murders. With so much false information and doomsday cults in our present day society, this book sheds a light on the insanity of off the wall beliefs. The story kept me reading until the end, shaking my head trying to understand how beliefs can spiral out of control.

The Doomsday Mother is a 10 star book! A chilling, gripping true crime book that is full of suspense. John Glatt carefully and concisely lays out the events that unfold to reveal the horror and evil occurring, which makes it easy for the reader to follow with breathtaking anticipation . This is truly a book that you will want to read in one sitting.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the privilege of reading a page-turner.

This true crime event reads like a mind boggling fiction novel. It was so engaging and easy to read. I needed to know what happened next in the lives of these people who had extreme beliefs. This is a book for cult readers and true crime junkies alike.

It followed the lives of Lori Vallow and Chris Daybell separately and then joins the story when they meet. I liked how we got to know each one individually. It was interesting to see how life lead them to that point with each other and other people in their lives. I found the topic fascinating as I had when it aired on TV and I am glad to have all the facts now.

I received an arc via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this book in exchange for an honest review.
I've been following the Lori Vallow/ Chad Daybell case from the beginning and it's definitely a strange and complicated case. There are so many people involved and I had been confused about that but John Glatt breaks this case down very well.
It will be interesting to see what finally becomes of this case and if justice for Tammy, and especially JJ and Tylee, is ever served. As a resident of the county where Chad Daybell's trial will supposedly be held, (in another year 🙄) I know I wouldn't be picked for the jury but oh man, I'd love to be in the galley.

Weird story, however author was able to break it down easily. Excellent book.

Thanks to author, publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book. While I got the book for free, it had no bearing on the rating I gave it.

Fantastic book about Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell! Wonderfully written and a fast read. I read it in 2 days after getting an ARC copy. I love John Glatt's books! I just can't imagine what made Lori go off the rails. (Of coarse,I'd be off the rails if I had been married 5 times,too. ;) ) I'm anxious to hear about the upcoming trial of Lori and Chad. It should be interesting! #thedoomsdaymother #netgalley #johnglatt

I don't usually read non fiction books, but I had read in media about the missing children and the massive search to find them, they were found and it was such a sad story that I was intrigued to find out more. This book certainly covers a lot of history about what happened. Lori Vallow would probably never win any mother of the year awards, she is very vain and self serving, using her children at times to get back at anyone she feels has wronged her. She's onto her fifth marriage at the beginning of the book, a beach side one in Hawaii, her two kids, Tylee and JJ were missing at that point and she did not appear concerned about them. Ex husband number three was the father of Tylee and him and Lori had a very nasty fight over custody of her. Lori even had Tylee accuse her father of molesting her, causing the police to investigate. Lori also made it very difficult for him to see Tylee, moving to Hawaii at one point. Lori is a Mormon a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS). She eventually becomes involved with an offshoot of the LDS that believe the end is near, there will be a cataclysmic earthquake that will wipe out large parts of the USA. Chad Daybell is a prominent author of this type of thinking and considers himself a god, someone who can see spirits and tell if someone has a dark or light spirit in them. Lori and Chad (her fifth husband) eventually get together but at the expense of almost everyone that was close to them. A very heart wrenching story very well told. I only wish that the author had waited until the trial had taken place to include that outcome, otherwise I recommend. Thank you to #Netgalley and #St Martin's Press for the ARC.

Settle in for a long, fascinating read. T
If this was a fiction book, I'd say it was too crazy...to out there...
And yet, here we are, it's a true story and sad in every sense of the word.
This book really delves into the histories of the people that make up this horrific, timely, true crime story.
Very well done.
Pick it up when you've got nothing purposeful to do, because once you get started, you won't be able to put it down..

I was fascinated by this case when it was national news so a chance to have an insiders perspective was something I wasn’t going to pass up. And this read like a 3 part episode of Law & Order SVU and I am here for it! It took me a few to get all the characters straight in my head, but once I did it was go time!
Lori Vallow was a devout member of the church of Latter Day Saints and gets taken into a doomsday cult by the leader, Chad Daybell. The problem was, they both had families standing in their way of being able to be together. I got taken in by the cult, murder for hire and the denial that anything was wrong and their very extensive lifestyle that they were living all the while covering up what was really going on.
This was well researched and well written. The subject matter is tough to swallow, but that’s because it’s hard to imagine humans being so wrapped up in something that they forsake everything else, but that is the reality here. Truth is stranger than fiction.
Thanks to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for this arc in exchange for my review.
Publication date: January 18, 2022

I received this book from the publisher through Netgalley for review and all thoughts and opinions are my own..
This is one of the most disturbing true crime cases the United States has ever encountered. Many sought more information from newscasters and podcasts as the search for the children continued month after month. Hope waned. In this tell all book, the spiders web is unravelled and the full story becomes cohesive. The trial is yet to come, due to the pandemic, it has been delayed. For anyone who has been following along, this book fills in the gaps. Well written and clearly portrayed picture of Chad and Lori Daybell. This is the second of books I've read by the author and won't be the last, I hope.

I really wanted to read this true crime story, because I remember when J.J. and Tylee went missing and it made national headlines (2019 seems like a lifetime ago, but I guess it wasn’t). It seemed so crazy at the time, probably because it was. Then the pandemic started, their cases were delayed, and after they found the kids’ bodies, I pretty much stopped paying attention. This is a super-detailed timeline that really lays the case out in an interesting and easy way. It also delves into Chad and Lori’s lives, and how they ended up the way they did. We’ll get to why I’m only giving it 3.5 stars at the end…

For anyone not familiar with the story, Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell met at a loosely-Mormon conference (I say loosely, because the Mormon church wants nothing to do with this, and I’m pretty sure it resembles nothing that these two believed). Soon, their spouses are dead, two of Lori’s children are missing, and they’ve moved from Idaho to Hawaii to get married and start a new life. After months of the grandparents asking where the kids are, police in Idaho give Lori five days to produce them. When she doesn’t comply, she is extradited back, where she and Chad were charged with a multitude of crimes, including killing J.J. and Tylee, and burying them in the pet cemetery behind Chad’s house.

There was so much more to the story that I didn’t realize, like the kinds of things Chad and Lori believed. They believed they’d been married in multiple lives, but the apocalypse was near and God brought them together to lead 144,000 to salvation. They believed people had either light or dark energies, and dark energies were “zombies” that needed to be released from Earth. Lori believed that she actually was a god, and that she was immortal. She claimed to not need to eat or go to the bathroom (the old Kim Jong Un defense) and believed she couldn’t be killed. She also believed in Chad’s many books about the apocalypse and conspiracy theories. There is so much more in the book - you’ll be blown away!

Religion played a huge part in all of this, but again, I wouldn’t say they were typical LDS members by any means. Many of their beliefs sounded more like Scientology - souls trapped on the planet, energies surrounding everyone, being eternally bound to your faith, etc. I believe that each of their strict religious backgrounds certainly didn’t help matters, but I think, especially with Lori, this is severe mental illness. Schizophrenia, or some type of narcissistic personality disorder? I’m not a doctor so I can’t say, but it’s quite rare that only attending a relatively mainstream church would push people to these extremes.

This stuff was all fascinating, and made for a great read that I was going to give 4.5 stars. I was afraid it would be dry, but the only place it was dry was the beginning, going through Lori and Chad’s lives. She had some issues; I lost count of how many kids she had and adopted, and Chad is her fifth husband. Chad also has five children, and Lori’s family history is full of unstable people, many siblings, and they had too many friends/followers to count. These people were all important to the plot (and quite a few ended up dead), so by the end, I didn’t mind going through all of the relationships to see how everything correlated.

The reason it only gets 3.5 stars (rounded up because this was better than I thought it would be) is because this isn’t over yet! I thought maybe I missed their sentences in pandemic news, but sentencing hasn’t happened; they are both still incarcerated pending further legal action. She was found unfit to stand trial and is in what they used to call “a prison for the criminally insane” (sorry, I don’t know the current terminology but I’m sure it’s not that). Chad is still behind bars, awaiting trial. There should be some sort of outcome this year, at least in his case, so I don’t understand the rush to publication. I’m glad the book was written, but in a year or two, half of the ending might be obsolete (this book comes out in two days). I wasn’t pleased by that, but otherwise, this was a fascinating look at this horrific case.

(Thank you to St. Martin’s Press, John Glatt, and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my review.)

Considering this case is still ongoing, this true crime account was pretty detailed and thorough. The Vallow/Daybell case is fascinating and heartbreaking, and I felt Glatt did a good job capturing that.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the free e-copy.

Excellent writing. Stayed with it, skipped dinner. I was not acquainted with John Glatt's writing but now I know he is a professional. The story of this woman and the culture she lives in is alarming and frightening. Is there an element in the LDS church that encourages one's perception that they are getting direct communication from God? That God can speak and tell you what to do? I don't know if blame can be laid there. Apparently, according to the book, many members warned the protagonist that she was going too far with her belief system.
The media was full of her name some months ago and for that avalanche alone I avoided learning what the case was all about. But you will learn it all from this book and it really makes you wonder, how can people who think like this function every day?
Really liked the quality of this book, which very wisely abstains from comments, judgements and exclamation marks. Doesn't need to use those. The way the author divulges the details does the trick.

I had heard of this case but I did not know the details.
This book provided a thorough account of the terrible and absolutely heinous crimes the people are accused of.
I voluntarily reviewed an advance reader copy of this book.

This was a very well researched, well written book. It was easy to follow along with, although hard to stomach at times. It's very obvious that Lori wasn't all there mentally. I hate moms that kill children, or at least in this case have children killed. As a mom myself it's unfathomable. However I do wish the author had waited to write this book until the cases were over and dealt with. 3.5 stars rounded down.