What do you do if you’re an American ex-pat living in London who loses your job reporting for NBC News? Write a mystery/comedy about a bumbling amateur detective searching for the 10-year-old bully who has gone missing from her son’s posh English private school, natch.
That’s the outline of Sarah Harman’s first novel, All the Other Mothers Hate Me, and while it’s not going to win any publishing prizes, it’s a breezy read with more than a few lol moments.
The narrator is Florence Grimes, the 31-year-old single “mum” of Dylan. A former singer in a band called Girls’ Night, she left the group (to her eternal regret) before it became famous and is now delivering balloon arches to Londoners who can afford them. The tone of the book is established with the opening sentence: “The missing boy is 10-year-old Alfie Risby, and to be perfectly honest with you, he’s a little shit.”
While the police investigate Alfie’s disappearance, Florence starts to find troubling signs that maybe Dylan had something to do with it. And so in an effort to clear her son’s name, she teams up with another single school mom, a high-strung corporate attorney named Jenny, to play their own version of Keystone Kops.
Harman has fun throughout needling British high society. Here’s her description of the home of a teacher where an emergency parents’ meeting is held: “The walls are lined with oil paintings of fruit and dead-eyed children… A truly posh English person has no need for House & Gardens; the scruffiness is its own quiet boast.” And of one of her sister’s bridesmaids: “The same features that make her brother blandly handsome — the strong jaw, the dark hair, the haunted-owl eyes — render Pandora’s face disconcerting, like a cubist painting, or one of the lesser royal cousins.”
But while Florence is a fun hang throughout the book, the plot doesn’t hold readers’ attention like more tightly crafted mysteries by the likes of Paula Hawkins or Ruth Ware. To be fair, it has a much lighter tone than those literary thrillers, but by the denouement, it would be nice to feel more dread. There’s never a sense that Florence is really putting her life in danger, despite the presence of a kidnapper and a gun.
There is a conclusion though, and Harman writes eloquently about motherhood in the story’s final pages. She’s created a character in Florence that readers will like spending time with, so who knows, if enough of them buy the book, maybe this is the start of a No. 2 Ladies’ Detective Agency.
