Publisher’s Description
A best-selling author. A mother. A murderer…
Mackenzie Casper is a brilliant student. But she is best known for her mother, a best-selling author whose dark, twisted thrillers have a dedicated worldwide fanbase.
When her mother dies in an accident, fans across the world are left grieving, and the investigators are asking: Was that really an accident?
The day of the memorial service, Mackenzie gets the first mysterious envelope, signed,
From #1 fan. XOXO.
Inside are the pages of her mother’s diary that start with the lines:
Want to know a secret?
Love, Mom.
What Mackenzie reads leaves her in shock.
Then comes the second letter.
And the third…
Mackenzie starts her own investigation and stumbles upon secrets that her family has lived with for years.
Quickly, she realizes that her mother’s path to stardom was etched with sinister lies that might have caught up with her.
Sometimes fame is worth a murder. Or worse.
Soon, Mackenzie will come to find out that there are worse things than murder…
Love, Mom book review by Thrilling Reads
Iliana Xander’s Love, Mom is the rare psychological thriller that slips under your skin and blooms into a slow-burn bruise. The novel alternates between present-tense chapters narrated by college prodigy Mackenzie Casper and chilling flashbacks embedded in anonymous letters that begin arriving the day of her mother’s memorial. Each one is signed, “From #1 fan. XOXO.” That period hits like a dagger point—and so does every new revelation as the story builds toward a finale that explodes with the sudden clarity of a camera flash.
Character is Xander’s masterstroke. Mackenzie has spent her life eclipsed by her mother, a bestselling queen of dark fiction whose global fanbase borders on cultish. Their relationship was icy at best; now Mackenzie must mourn a woman she never truly understood. When she overhears her father arguing with a stranger at the wake, grief curdles into suspicion, and the letters shove her down a rabbit hole of buried secrets, literary envy, and lethal obsession.
Then come the twists. From that first taunting envelope to the breath-snatching climax, every chapter detonates a fresh surprise. Reading feels less like turning pages and more like clattering through a pitch-black fun-house ride—exactly the roller-coaster vibe Amazon reviewers rave about (“I read it straight through… kept me up all night”). Yet Xander balances shock with substance, probing artistic legacy, parasocial devotion, and the uneasy ways parents imprint on their children.
Never bloated, always propulsive, Love, Mom clocks in at just over 300 pages and wastes none of them. It’s an unmissable treat for fans of Freida McFadden, Kiersten Modglin, and Alice Feeney—and my favorite read of 2025 so far. Clear your calendar; you won’t escape until the final, haunting sentence. Five blood-stained stars from Thrilling Reads.
