Source - Received from the publisher to review
You always put your own child first, don't you?
When an explosion rips through her daughter's school, Rose McKenna faces a horrifying choice. Does she go in search of her daughter, or save the children nearest to her first, one of whom is the bully who has been making her daughter's life a misery?
It's a split-second decision which will cost one girl dearly and will see Rose's life transformed forever...
Thank you to Hannah at Ebury Press for sending me a copy of this book to review. After reading the synopsis on Amazon I was looking forward to reading this book especially as I'd never read any of Lisa Scottoline's books before.
Rose had thought that if she volunteered as a lunch mom that she would be able to watch over and protect her daughter Melly. So when she witnesses a child making fun of her daughter's birthmark causing Melly to run off towards the toilets, she approaches the child to have a word with her.
Shortly afterwards there is a loud explosion which knocks her briefly unconscious, when she comes to her first instinct is to go to the toilet to search for Melly but instead she directs the child she was talking to, Amanda, and the others towards the hallway out towards the playground then returns to rescue Melly.
Rose manages to rescue Melly from the locked toilet and carry her to safety suffering from smoke inhalation. However, things take a turn for the worse when she is approached by a teacher at the hospital asking what happened to Amanda as she never made it outside. She is shocked as she had seen her running down the hallway towards the open door.
When Amanda is found trapped under debris, fingers start pointing at Rose saying that she put her child's life first over others. She is shocked when told that there is the possibility that civil or criminal charges could be brought against her as she doesn't feel that she did anything wrong.
After her attorneys advise her to sue the school, she fires them and decides to take matters into her own hands and begins her own investigations to find out exactly what caused the explosion that day.... she soon discovers more than she expected.
If I had to say something negative about the book it would be the fact that there was no lead up to the explosion, it happens in the first chapter so you didn't get to learn much about the characters before events unfold!
This is very much a book in several parts, the explosion and its impact, the hate campaign against her by the other parents and then the subsequent investigations into the cause of the explosion and who was to blame.
The first half of the book flowed well but if I'm honest it got a little too far-fetched in the middle but overall it was an enjoyable read but probably not one I'll read again. I've heard rave reviews about some of Lisa's older books so will try and find cheap copies of her other books to see what they are like.
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