VBT# The Other Mother - Heidi Field

VBT# Review - The Other Mother - Book #2 The Peasedle Woods Killer Series - Heidi Field - November 2025

Oh, come and settle in with me for a moment, grab yourself a warm drink and get comfortable, because today's tour stop has me with plenty to say! When the lovely folks at Zooloos Book Tours knocked on The Phantom Paragrapher's door with Heidi Fields' The Other Mother, I cleared my reading chair, pulled the blanket over my knees, and dove straight in. And what a tangled, twisty web awaited me.

Right from the opening pages, the premise alone had me hooked like a fish on a line. Suzannah is pregnant with her third child. Her first is in prison. Her second is dead. If that tagline doesn't make you sit bolt upright and demand answers, then I honestly don't know what will. It's the kind of setup that lodges itself in your brain at two in the morning and refuses to leave quietly.

Suzannah herself is a fascinatingly complex creation. She is deeply flawed, morally murky, and yet and here's where Heidi Fields does her most interesting work ,  you find yourself reluctantly rooting for her anyway. She's wrapped herself in so many layers of deception around her charming, unsuspecting fiancé Alec that you spend half the novel wincing on her behalf, waiting for the whole beautifully constructed house of cards to come crashing down around her. The tension that builds from her hidden past is genuinely suffocating at times, in the best possible way.

The supporting threats feel real and pressingly urgent. An ex-husband slinking back from the shadows, demanding answers about their dead daughter. A manipulative serial killer dangling Suzannah's imprisoned son over her head like a weapon. Every time poor Suzannah gets a breath, another hand reaches up to drag her back under. Heidi Fields clearly understands that the most effective psychological thrillers aren't about one big secret , they're about the avalanche effect of many secrets colliding at once.

That said, and I'll be honest with you here the way I'd be honest with a friend over the kitchen table, The Other Mother doesn't quite reach the heights its premise promises. The pacing wobbles in the middle section, and there were moments where I felt the revelations were telegraphed a touch too early, deflating what should have been genuinely shocking moments. Some secondary characters felt underdeveloped, and I wanted more emotional depth in the resolution, which arrived a little too neatly given the messy, complicated journey that preceded it.

But here's the thing  for an entertaining, perfectly readable thriller that kept me turning pages on a rainy afternoon? It absolutely delivers. Not every book needs to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes you just want a good, propulsive story with a morally complicated woman at its centre, and The Other Mother provides exactly that.

A solid three stars from this little corner of the book world. A perfectly decent thriller for fans of domestic suspense who don't mind a protagonist keeping secrets the size of mountains.

A huge thank you to Zooloos Book Tours for including The Phantom Paragrapher on this virtual tour stop.

Amazon: https://amzn.to/4aEOSBV