The first Kate Morton novel I ever read was The Forgotten Garden, about fifteen years ago now, and I absolutely loved it, which is why I have read every Kate Morton novel since. All of Kate Morton’s novels feature a central mystery told through a dual timeline where a protagonist from the present works to unravel the secrets of the past. The kind of novels that are like catnip to me. My love for Kate Morton’s novels has waned over the years, though, because I find them too predictable and the coincidences a little too neat. But it has taken me reading Homecoming to realize that I cannot blame Kate Morton for me becoming too clever for my own good. For the casual reader, Homecoming holds plenty of surprises. And even if it is on the predictable side, Homecoming spins a good yarn.

Homecoming hearkens back to my favourite Kate Morton novel, The Forgotten Garden, in that both novels feature a protagonist who was raised by her grandmother because of her complicated relationship with her mother, and who is compelled to seek out answers to her grandmother’s mysterious past when her grandmother falls ill.

Homecoming opens with a terrible tragedy when a mother and three of her children are found dead next to a creek in Adelaide Hills, South Australia on Christmas Eve in 1959. In 2018, Jess is a freelance journalist trying to scrape by a living in London, when she finds out her grandmother, Nora, has had a fall and is in the hospital. Jess immediately flies back home to Sydney to be with her grandmother and learns through her grandmother’s caregiver and housekeeper that Nora had been agitated as of late and had fallen when trying to go up to the attic of her house. Jess wonders why Nora would have wanted to go to the attic, but Nora never ends up regaining enough consciousness to be able to tell her. Instead, through some journalist sleuthing, Jess learns about the tragic 1959 Adelaide Hills cold case and her family’s connection to it and eventually pieces together what she supposes might have really happened to the mother and her children, while the reader, on the other hand, gets a complete picture of what happened as the novel weaves in and out of the past and present timelines.

For me, Homecoming is the best Kate Morton novel since The Forgotten Garden. While I was able to figure out certain things about the mystery at the heart of the novel, there was still enough to leave me pleasantly surprised. The thing about Kate Morton’s writing is that no matter how terrible the tragedy, no matter how horribly certain characters act, there is still enough hope and forgiveness in her novels to warm my cynical heart. Her novels are comfort food for the literary soul.