review: the secret keeper by kate morton

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The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton opens in the 1960s with a teenaged Laurel witnessing her mother kill a man. The police deem it self-defense and Kate Morton moves the story along to 2011 when Laurel's mother is living her last days. The story then shifts to when Laurel's mother was a young woman during World War II. It becomes quite clear that the murder is somehow connected to what happened during the war, but Morton drags out the story by constantly having the characters have a revelation or experience that is kept secret from the reader. Once revealed, the secrets were quite shocking and made for a very interesting plot retrospectively, but The Secret Keeper would have been more powerful had Morton shifted back to 2011 a bit less.
3/5
Review copy provided by the publisher, Washington Square Press.