A Funny Mystery to Revitalize Your Book Club: Read an Excerpt of ALL THE OTHER MOTHERS HATE ME By Sarah Harman

Prologue

The missing boy is ten-year-old Alfie Risby, and to be perfectly honest with you, he’s a little shit.

I realize that’s a horrible thing to say about a child, particularly one who is missing. But—and I’m not proud of this—if I’d had to choose a boy in Dylan’s class to vanish in broad daylight, Alfie would have been at the top of my list.

There are some kids you just kind of want to punch, and Alfie was one of them. Perhaps it was his hair—that pale red shade we used to call strawberry blonde. Or his dull, raisin-colored eyes. Or the way his sharp little teeth gave him a distinctly ferret-like appearance.

Their sharpness is a point of fact: Last year he bit his nanny, Cecilia, so hard she needed stitches. For weeks, she appeared at afternoon pickup like a sad ghost, clutching her bandaged forearm.

The one time I volunteered to chaperone a school trip, a class picnic to Hampstead Heath, Alfie leaned over a plate of sausage rolls and told me, very casually, as if we were two adults at a bar, that he “quite liked my slag fingernails.”

And then there’s his family. They weren’t just run-of-the-mill St. Angeles rich. They were in a whole other league.

“Like richer than God,” one of the other mothers had whispered to me during last year’s spring fundraiser, as we arranged sugar cookies on tiny plastic trays.

But if I’m being honest, my feelings about Alfie had nothing to do with his hair or his wealth or his ferret teeth. No. My dislike of Alfie stemmed entirely from the way he treated Dylan, my precocious, sensitive only son, like he was a bug to be crushed.

And nobody crushes my kid.

One

Shepherd’s Bush, London
Friday, 7:45 a.m.

I wake up with a Girls’ Night song stuck in my head. To be honest, “The Quake” never took off like the label had hoped. It didn’t help that a devastating, 8.9-magnitude tremor had ripped through Southern California the same week our single was released, collapsing a multistory parking garage like a soufflé and trapping 346 people inside. The song itself is still a jam, though.

You’re like an earthquake,
Richter 10 heartbreak
Said you wanna “short break”
Then takin’ up with that skan—

I hum to myself under the covers, imagining that I’m performing to a sold-out Wembley Stadium instead of about to take a lukewarm shower on the ground floor of half a Victorian terraced house. Not even the whole damn house.

“Dylan!” I shriek. “Get up! You’re gonna be late for school!”

My son appears in the doorway, fully dressed, right down to his St. Angeles cap and tie.

“Ha-ha, very funny, Mum.” He rolls his eyes and presses a cold can of Red Bull into my hands.

I take a sip. Our morning ritual complete, I pull the warm duvet back over my face.

“Seriously, though, can we not be late today?” my son pleads. “Ms. Schulz says the coach won’t wait this time.”

A dim memory of a permission slip surfaces, of scrawling my initials in eggplant-colored eyeliner and checking the “not available to chaperone” box.

“Because of the field trip?” I murmur, from beneath the duvet.

“Yes. Wetland Centre. Bird-watching. Can you get up now, please?”

“Right. You excited?” I’m stalling, but he’s in an even bigger hurry than usual. Perhaps this means the bullying has finally stopped.

Dylan turns his pleading green eyes on me. “Can’t I just walk by myself?” he says, half question, half whine.

I remove the duvet from my face for a second time. Dull late-autumn light is filtering through the shutters now, piercing my retinas. I drag myself upright. Why does it have to be so bright in the mornings?

“Dylan. We’ve been over this. You’re ten. You’re not walking to school alone. You wanna end up in some hairy old pedophile’s basement? Hmm? You wanna spend the rest of your life—”