Book Review: One Fatal Mistake | Tom Hunt

This is one hold-onto-your-seat, heart-pounding book! What started out as a steady-paced domestic suspense novel about a secret kept took a turn and didn’t let up for the entire rest of the book! I can barely put into words how fun this roller coaster of a story is! Tom Hunt’s One Fatal Mistake is sure to be a best-seller.

About the Book

Her son accidentally kills a man.
They cover it up.
Then everything goes wrong.

When eighteen-year-old Joshua Mayo takes a man’s life in a horrible accident, he leaves the scene without reporting the crime to the police. He hopes to put the awful night behind him and move on with his life. But, of course, he ends up telling his mother, Karen, what happened.

Karen has raised Joshua on her own in Cedar Rapids, Iowa–and she’d thought they’d finally made it. He was doing well in school and was only months from starting college. After hearing his dark confession, she is forced to make a choice no parent should have to make, one that draws them both into a web of deceit that will change their lives forever–if they make it out alive….

Reflection

The book opens with divorced-mother Karen certain that something is off with her son Joshua. She knows he recently broke up with his girlfriend, but this seems like something more than that. And of course, we learn that itis. Joshua is involved in an accident late one night and a man loses his life. Joshua fled without reporting the incident, but he feels regret, shame, and fear over what he has done.

Karen is such a fantastic character and mother. She is truly a good person, but Karen also knows that ethical decisions aren’t so easy to make. In fact, early in the novel we learn about a choice Karen made that wasn’t so easy just a few months previously. When she follows Joshua late one night and learns what he did, she makes another choice that isn’t so straight-forward to make. And from there, she and Joshua must suffer the fallout of their choices…

I want to be cautious here and avoid talking about a few major elements of this book, because I think they’d be considered spoiler-y. What I am comfortable saying is that this book is filled with morality and immorality. A series of choices that seem right at the time, can often lead someone so far down a path, that there really is no way to turn back. And that is what I’ll say about this book. Karen and Joshua make choice after choice that lead them further from safety and honesty.

The brilliance, though, is that all of those choices are kind of understandable. As a reader, I empathized with their decisions, even if it felt like the wrong ones at the time. I find the pace of this novel to be incredibly fast, but still rich with inner monologue. This is a book fueled by action and plot, rather than characters. It is a wild read and one I think readers are going to have a ton of fun with!

The ending to me was really well-executed. I didn’t necessarily expect the conclusion we got, but at the same time it totally seemed fitting. There was a rawness to this book that started page one and carried through to the very last scene. I definitely will read more from Tom Hunt, and I can’t wait to hear what readers think of One Fatal Mistake!