Mother Dear

There’s only one thing worse than doing the unthinkable: what you’re willing to do to hide it.

Helen lives a decent, uncomplicated life. Satisfied in her career, she’s raising three happy teenagers, and her family has the most envied house on the street. Admittedly, she’s growing just a little disenchanted with her marriage to her workaholic husband, Werner. But that’s nothing she can’t fix. Then one day Helen comes home to something completely unexpected that threatens to shatter her carefully cultivated world.

For disaffected, young petty criminals Ralf and Brian, it was a scheme to make some cash: a quick home invasion. The targets they’ve chosen are Helen and Werner. With Ralf as lookout, Brian disappears into Helen and Werner’s house. But he never comes out.

And Helen’s nightmare is just beginning. She can’t possibly imagine how much worse it can get or just how far she’ll need to go to protect her family.

Nova Lee Maier is a pseudonym of Dutch bestselling author Esther Verhoef, whose psychological thrillers and novels have sold more than 2.5 million copies in the Netherlands. Esther is the recipient of numerous awards, including the NS Publieksprijs (NS Audience Award/Prix Public); the Hebban Crimezone Award; the Diamanten Kogel (Diamond Bullet); and for Mother Dear, the prestigious Gouden Strop (Golden Noose) Award for best crime thriller of the year. She is also the author of Close-Up and Rendezvous, both available in English. For more information, visit www.novaleemaier.com and www.estherverhoef.com.

Jozef van der Voort is a professional translator adapting Dutch, German, and French into English. A Dutch-British dual national, he grew up in southeast England and studied literature and languages in Durham and Sheffield. He has lived and worked in Austria, France, Luxembourg, Germany, and Belgium. As a literary translator, he took part in the Emerging Translators Programme run by New Books in German and was also named runner-up in the 2014 Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize. Mother Dear is his first translated novel.