All posts tagged: Kelly Simmons

Kelly Simmons on her newest domestic thriller, NOT MY BOY, how parenting boys is different than parenting girls, her three most-recommended books, procrastination, more

By Leslie Lindsay  ~WRITER’S INTERVIEWING WRITERS|ALWAYS WITH A BOOK~ April Spotlight: Siblings A missing child, a mother-son new to a neighborhood, multiple suspects, an entangled family, and more in NOT MY BOY. I loved Kelly Simmons’s ONE MORE DAY and when I learned she had a new one out, I knew I needed to get my hands on it. NOT MY BOY (Sourcebooks Landmark, January 2021) is a bit of family drama meets domestic suspense with touches of Lisa Unger’s IN THE BLOOD meets Gilly Macmillian’s TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH. Hannah Sawyer is a writer–she’s working on various things, but mostly ghost-writing a woman’s memoir–but she’s also a divorced mother of a young boy, Miles. They have recently moved into a cozy carriage house on the property of a larger, more established home in a neighborhood where Hannah’s sister, Hillary, and her husband and daughter live. It’s within just days (maybe even hours) that a little girl goes missing. Suddenly, everyone in the neighborhood is captivated by this case. Secrets abound in NOT MY BOY, in which everyone becomes a …

WeekEND Reading: Kelly Simmons on her “dark & stormy” nights, why she hates the term ‘red herrings,’ the chasm between the supernatural and religious worlds in ONE MORE DAY & why she’s glad I didn’t ask about M&Ms

By Leslie Lindsay  ONE MORE DAY was so emotionally riveting, so devastating, and so well told that I couldn’t get enough. In fact, when I closed the book for the last time (after reading *everything* including the acknowledgements, discussion questions, and about the author), I still looked Kelly Simmons and her other books up on-line. That, to me, is the sign of good book.   The plot revolves around young Ben (2 years old) who goes missing from his car when his mother turns her back for just a brief moment to pay the parking meter. Sounds innocuous enough, right? But then we start getting glimpses that this mother just isn’t right, that there’s something ‘off.’ It was her flawed character (in fact, the *entire* book is brimming with flawed characters, from her mother, husband, friends, and more), and that’s very intriguing to me. Two-year old Ben is missing and no one knows where he is, and there weren’t very many witnesses. Plus, the mother’s alibi doesn’t exactly jive. It’s nearly a year later and …