Valley of the Moms

by Hannah Selinger

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

Stepford Wives meets Big Little Lies in this twisty thriller that uncovers the untruths, petty grievances, and local school politics underneath a seemingly quaint small town.

Hamilton, Massachusetts is one of those suburban towns that appears untouched by the outside world where stay-at-home moms wear 2ct diamond studs to the playground, where a million-dollar property is “affordable,” and where the Parent Teacher Organization is a hotbed of controversy. Sure, some people struggle to make ends meet, but residents would say discussing such ugly matters is impolite. Hamilton has been like this forever, and everyone likes it that way. Or: almost everyone.

It's not that Anna Plummer doesn't like Hamilton, but she never thought she'd be married with two young kids, comfortable, complacent…and growing more bored by the minute. So, when she realizes her second grader won't be able to attend the "Ziti with Your Sweetie" school dance because she didn’t pay for a “Premium” membership, she snaps. She sends an email to the terrifying president of the PTO—and all hell breaks loose.

One year later, Anna is found dead in the frozen Ipswich River. Left to pick up the pieces, her husband, Denny, is shaken to his core. He's no expert, but he's seen enough Dateline to know that the police think he's the main suspect. If they aren't going to get justice for Anna, he will. Told through the alternating perspectives of Anna and Denny exactly one year apart, and with a shocking concluding twist, Valley of the Moms is a gripping look at the underpinnings of grief, the social structures of wealth, and the secrets people keep—even among friends and loved ones.

Release date: June 16, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 304

Sample

A BODY. OR what used to be one. This time of year, winter, is unforgiving—a canvas of white too frigid for humanity. If a body might become bloated in Massachusetts’ humid summer, the opposite is true in the coldest month of January. Here is a person that looks more like a porcelain doll, with pale, blue-tinged skin, and the dull, cloudy eyes of a fish you wouldn’t bring home from the market.

The Ipswich River no doubt holds many secrets, and it has held hers for days, until now, when it has released her from its frozen bottom. The first real hard cold—an eruption—will do that. The river tracks forty-five miles from Burlington through its namesake’s Great Marsh, meandering through the small towns of Essex County. It’s mostly shallow, a canoeing spot for locals, certainly not as dangerous as the nearby Merrimack, where the Coast Guard is regularly dispatched to rescue boats that have been caught in the dangerous choppy waters where the river meets the Atlantic.

And yet. A danger, clearly, a pernicious river, a body of water that consumes and conceals. This frozen relic, she has arrived at the once-muddy banks, herself a new mystery. In small towns, where the daily drone of life is everyone’s business, a woman does not just show up on a riverbank in the middle of the winter, expelled from the ice and snow and mud. In a small town, there are no accidents or coincidences, only things that have not yet come to light.

Walking past the canoe launch on a snowy Saturday afternoon, a couple stops to admire the light. It is yellow, it is orange, it is somehow also almost blue. They take out phones to capture the flakes dancing off the trees, the once-sunken river that is now almost overflowing with recent rains and snow, so different from a drought the year before, and then they see her, a doll, hair beneath a layer of ice, Ophelia in winter, with the vermilion sun setting, and it is beautiful, and it is criminal, all this loss, all this that goes unanswered.

NO SNOW, NOT through the entire wretched month of December, nor into January this year, which has been unseasonably warm. Awake before the alarm, Anna looked out at the trees that faced her bedroom window, tall, grim, gray specters. When she was growing up in Massachusetts, she could depend on one thing in these cold, bare months, and it was the pleasure of waking up to unexpected snowfall. Heart racing, she would turn on the television to watch the scrolling of town names, alphabetical, a crazy-making exercise. Her town began with an N, Newburyport. It was always promising to see Essex County rival Amesbury closures up toward the top of the list. That meant mostly good news: a snow day, or at least a delayed start, with parents off to work and the exotic, silent, snowcapped world all to herself for the day. But sometimes the South Shore towns got hit harder, or Newburyport’s coastal location created a sort of buffer of insulation. You were sure to end up in school if it was six inches or less. No magic in walking up the streets in boots over flared jeans, that was for sure.

What she would give, she sometimes thought, to relive those mornings. Even a dusting would feel prophetic at this point, a sign of the mere existence of winter and not climate change and rot. Anna’s house, which she shared with her son, daughter, husband, and dog, was perched high on a hill and looked down onto Hamilton’s busiest road, which was, in the quickening dawn, slicked by rain. A kind of bruising sky, she noted, has started to emerge in the direction of Cutler’s Pond, where she once imagined her children would learn to ice skate, but she had put that vision away, along with other feeble notions of parenthood. Sometimes, it was good enough just to survive.

“So early again,” she heard her husband, Denny, say, as she skipped the lights in the bedroom and attempted to tiptoe through the dark, making more noise than she meant to. It did seem like each day the clock ticked back earlier and earlier, but what was she to do with all of those extra minutes—those extra hours—anyway? This time, it was not useful. When we want things to slow down, she thought, we cannot, and when we want things to speed up, they only drag on, like heels through wet sand.

Only after she had closed the door to the dark primary bathroom did she turn on a sconce and study her face. Forty-two years old. Fine lines just starting to crawl out from around her mouth, but otherwise—this she would confess—she wasn’t bad-looking. She had not fallen even a little gray yet, only dyed her hair to get rid of the ordinary brown color her mother used to refer to as mousy. (The first time: eighth grade, a semi-permanent dye called “Glints” by Clairol that turned her hair a shiny and forgiving auburn and that washed out in under three weeks.) Up it went now, into a loose ponytail, a honey-brown blond that looked like it had spent time in the sun, even in the Massachusetts winter.

Hazel eyes stared back at her from the long, flat mirror in the bathroom, where everything needed to be replaced, if they ever got around to it: the greige bathroom that they inherited from the Greek owners before them, the ones who preferred to keep their furniture large and at odd angles, who liked light fixtures encrusted with fake gems, who decorated in colors named after vegetables. Aubergine. Bell Pepper. She and Denny had chipped away at the rooms one at a time, building a Farrow & Ball fantasy: high-gloss, wallpaper, brushed brass, their living, breathing masterpiece, part of the pretension of existing in this wealthy New England town, where you had to dress up to walk the damn dog, for Christ’s sake.

Downstairs, Anna enjoyed her favorite five minutes of the day, before Denny, before the dog, Hank, and his clawing at the slider, before the kids and the backpacks and the school lunches, and even before the hum of the very expensive automatic espresso maker that cost over $2,500 but leaked onto the counter every time they refilled the water canister. The kitchen was silent, and a little bit dark, and a little bit cold, and Anna Plummer, a small, average mother, did the thing she did every single morning when she came down here into a room that she liked well enough: sighed deeply, looked around, and felt precisely nothing.

There was nothing wrong, and if she were the kind of person who measured out her life in spoons—good or bad, depending on how you read the metaphor—well, even she would agree that there was enough to be thankful for. A sea of bluestone pavers extended out from beyond the sliding glass doors. Past the pavers was grass that had seen better days, the edge to the cleared property, where oak trees rose up from the soft and fallow ground. The January rains had made everything wet and tender, springy and covered in mud. She had a job. Boring, yes, but it paid okay, and it was predictable. Copywriting, some might say, even used the part of her brain that mothers in wealthy towns felt went dormant after too many years spent rearing children. Driving carpool. That sort of thing.

Anna twisted the oval engagement ring around her finger again and again. Force of habit—she never actually took it off. She glanced at the clock on the stove. Not quite six. Would Di be awake, she wondered? Should she chance it? It wasn’t really like she had anything all that important to say. More like she wanted company in this desolate skeleton hour, and Di, with two kids and a cold and achy house of her own, might be awake, too, watching the steam rise off her coffee, thinking about the time that seemed to go nowhere at this hour of the morning.

Did you watch? she texted, meaning the latest episode of a Real Housewives franchise that they’re extremely into right now.

No, and no spoilers. I mean it. I know how u are.

Not even a pause between texts. Anna did feel gratitude that she was not the only one up in these dark hours, driving her husband so crazy, even if her best friend of thirty years wouldn’t let her gossip about television strangers.

Ok, ok, but what else am I supposed to talk about

Idk. Your annoying husband. Your annoying kids. Whatever ppl talk about when they’re not talking about tv

Fine Louisa threatened to cut her hair yesterday and I told her over my dead body and I think she considered it

My turn. Henry is so bad at soccer that the coach suggested he switch to t-ball.

Ok that’s genuinely embarrassing Di I’m sorry

Three dots lingered for a minute—Di was writing something or thinking about it and erasing it—but then the text chain went still. Truth was, Anna didn’t have much to say, either. She was just killing time, waiting for the dawn, for something wild and interesting to happen, and it felt like it was mostly like that these days, on the precipice of a story that was about to be written, if only someone could figure out how to start writing it.

When she was young, Anna wanted to be an artist. It wasn’t that she possessed any more or less talent than the average student. She hadn’t mastered perspective particularly early, nor was she adept with a pencil. But there was something romantic about distilling life into an oil painting. And it was oil that drew her—not the cheap paints known as egg tempera. Tempera could be washed out. There was a reason that the classic artists all painted in oil, that the resounding and resilient art that lasted for centuries—that was painted upon frescoes and that was painstakingly studied by art historians—was produced in oil pigment, powders from nature’s original colors mixed with, yes, oil.

Anna had experimented with all kinds of art: fan brushes, palette knives, pointillism, collage, even a phase where she just threw paint at the canvas like Jackson Pollock. That phase had been inspired by his 1998 retrospective at MoMA, but if she was being honest, she had never heard of Pollock before, had just read about him in the paper and had followed the trail of hopeful academics, and had been just as enthralled as the glamorous then-couple Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke as she had been by the art itself.

It was a little different, years later, when the Gerhard Richter exhibit came up. By then, MoMA had been renovated, she was deep into an unofficial minor in art history, and halfway through a class on German Expressionism that threatened to turn her off art altogether, something about Richter’s candle painting—the one from Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation—arrested her. Some artists see a master in real life and chase the high forever. The actual thing—the painting—reignites their passion. For Anna, it was a recognition that she would never paint like that. She could never make a candle look like it was absolutely glowing on canvas. That kind of talent was like a haunting, supernatural spirit. Eventually, she packed up her oils. Art was just another old and abandoned dream.

There was no reason to consider the abandonment of childhood ambition in this specific moment, although Anna had spied a tangle of art on the kitchen island, her son’s. He had a natural fluidity, an ease with a pencil. He could see a thing and translate it without looking down, a trick she remembered hearing that Picasso used to train his own eye: Put the pencil to paper, stare at an object, and don’t look down at the paper itself. Make the line do the work and live with the results.

Her problem, when she thought about it, was that she had never quite been satisfied with the results. The perfectionist in her had always overtaken the process, and she had yielded too completely to that inner voice that made her throw away anything that wasn’t a Platonic ideal. Back in New York, in their former small town in the Hamptons, it had been easier to discard any true notion of perfectionism. The women there were impossibly rich, for one thing. Unattainably rich. Billionaire rich. You could freely show up in sweatpants in public and know that it didn’t matter; one of them might own a major sports team, for all you knew.

But here in Hamilton, the playing field was actually level. These women, much as Anna hated to admit it, were her peers. They looked nothing like her, lived nothing like her, spent their money on things she didn’t really relate to. But they were all around the same age, probably from the same wide circle of communities north of Boston, had eaten at the same Dunkin’ Donuts growing up. Christ, they probably all knew that chocolate glazed was the best donut in existence, when it came down to it. So, yes, you did have to perform, all in a way she hadn’t been expecting when she proposed they move back up north. She had to strive for the fucking Gerhard Richter, and all that striving was exhausting. She had always believed that people should be allowed to be whoever they wanted, even if what they wanted was kind of ordinary, something she wouldn’t often admit about herself, except when she was alone.

When she and Denny planned this big escape, she had been thinking about Patagonia fleece vests and L.L.Bean flannel and the kind of down-home life that removed the pretense from wealth, but okay, that was unrealistic, because to live the kind of unflappable East Coast life that you see in Instagram reels—even the kind that she herself grew up with—you had to be kind of upper-crust. Fighting any of it was just an uphill battle. Now here she was, fighting some other battle to fit in. No one wore flannel shirts, it turned out. You just couldn’t get away with being the kind of person that Anna Plummer had aspired to be.

Her son, Ben, who was only five, stood in the entry to the kitchen, a halo of light surrounding him. Everyone talked about freezing time, and during the first years of his life she had only wanted to speed it up, to catapult through the messiness of diapers and strollers and naps that commandeered the day. But now, all these years into parenting, she could see her children needing her less, the softness from them evaporating. And she wished that she could go back to that place that she had been so desperate to escape.

This was the central conflict of motherhood: the inability to enjoy the moment you’re in because you’re always looking backward, constantly searching for a moment that has already receded into the rearview. Ben, dressed in dinosaur pajamas that said snore don’t roar—tiny T.rex prints all over top and bottom—clambered toward her, in a nearly kneecapping embrace. Little kids have no boundaries: They run in when you’re in the bathroom, knock the door down while you shower, will move mountains just to tell you that they had found a purple Lego and that it was a different shade of purple from the other purple Lego they found last week. All this can be annoying or special, depending on which day of the week they catch you—the way they need to include you in all of it, the way they can’t stop talking about the world, the way you’re the most important person in their lives.

“I’m hungry,” he said, burying his blond head in her legs. She leaned down and tousled his hair.

Aggravation. Obligation. Privilege. Parenting never ceased to be all three. “What moves you today?” she said, knowing the question would mostly elude him.

“What, Mama?”

“What are you hungry for? What do you want for breakfast?”

“Toast,” he said. “Cinnamon toast.”

She didn’t know why she asked when the answer was always the same. He was her less adventurous child, prone always to eating the same few things, to less experimentation. In the ’80s, when she was a kid, parents didn’t give in to the whims and wants of children, but these days, it was different. If Ben wanted to eat toast and bagels every day of his life, well, it was food, wasn’t it? Throw a bunch of grapes in there and you’ve got half the nutritional bases covered (she pictured the triangle she learned in grade school, but then again, they used to drink cans of juice with dinner, so what did they know about nutrition, anyway).

Louisa, seven and always late, showed up in the kitchen with Barbie dolls in each hand. She had the Malibu Dream House that she would have murdered to own forty years ago, but the whole point in having kids, Anna thought, was to give them a better shot. Malibu Dream Houses for everyone. Cinnamon toast and grapes. Live large, kids. You only get one chance. A sherbet-pink sky outside, even on what had promised to be a gray morning, both her children, noiseless, at the kitchen counter, and maybe January was just a word, maybe January didn’t have to be thematic, maybe January was not as restless as it felt when you woke up in the dark.

AT FIRST HE didn’t recognize the lights for what they were—bleeding into the snow, a flash of mostly blue with hints of indigo and scarlet. Denny thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. Fresh snow often gives the illusion of being blue, after all, and he was tired. So tired. The lights were yet another sign that his body was exhausted.

But no. It was a throb of lights. Sirens without the sound. The unmistakable pulse of a noiseless police car, parked outside his home. A tear in the fabric of his life. Something just beginning to unravel.

The second week of school after the holiday break had just started. On Thursday, the first day that Anna was gone, he remembered that his daughter had library and tucked her book for return in her backpack, he made the lunches and threw a load of laundry in before he left the house to drive the kids to school, and he had done it all unprompted not because his memory was getting any better but because she hadn’t been there to remind him. Also that day he had left cash out for the cleaning lady, and had texted Anna again: Where are you. At first, he thought she had just been out late with friends, but then he had gotten increasingly worried. While his mother-in-law watched the kids, he had circled the blocks repeatedly. He had screamed—however unreasonably—into the woods behind the house. There were acres all around them. Could she hear him? Finally, he had driven down to the local police department to file a report, but they seemed unconcerned. Bad things did not happen in small towns, or not towns like this one, where many of the property lines included two rolling acres and glossy SUVs, and the kinds of good graces you read about in a Robert Frost poem.

Good fences make good neighbors.

At the police station a good ol’ boy from a few towns over—Rowley, where Anna always loved to go flea-marketing in spring and summer at old Todd Farm—hitched up his pants and said, “Just cooling off, they do that, we see it a lot.” Then he picked something he must have found offensive off of the corner of his tongue, grabbed a notebook from the back pocket of a pair of navy department-issued pants that were too tight, and made a show of taking notes that Denny was sure the officer would never again look at.

Anna’s temper ran hot, flame-hot, everyone knew that, and maybe it wasn’t unlike her to drive to the woods and take a walk to cool off. Maybe it wasn’t even unlike her to turn her phone off for a few hours to make the people around her feel a little uneasy. But to disappear? That wasn’t like her, no. Her social media bore no trace of her. She hadn’t posted any snarky memes or liked anyone’s political commentary. She had simply vanished.

Now blue light bloomed on the snow outside, and Denny dreaded whatever came next: a knock, an apology, a conversation with his own small children, who were down in the basement watching TV with his mother-in-law, an extra, worried set of hands to help out during the nightmarish past few days. Denny sat facing the window, wondering how long it would take the officers to summon the courage to face their own demons, to admit that they had been wrong. She hadn’t just been cooling off. Denny had spent half the week driving the roads of Essex County looking for her, looking for her Volkswagen, but it was as if the world had swallowed her up, and it would take a lot to make a woman like Anna Plummer turn small, turn invisible, turn into nothing at all. It would take an act of God, a catastrophe so consuming it would take the icy fingers of the Hamilton Police Department itself—those dang blue lights—to make someone so large in this life disappear. After all, only a force larger than life could change the color of the snow. Only a force larger than life could make Anna Plummer disappear.

A door on the Crown Victoria opened. Denny watched the perfect snow absorb one man’s footsteps, then another. In Christmas carols and movies and poems, snow was always soft, he thought, but this was animal snow, crunchy and savage, the kind that held weight, the kind that held memories. Despite an unusually warm winter, it had snowed the week earlier, and hard, the kind that Anna had always described with a sort of childlike innocence when recalling her youth. The annoying kind of snow, thick pack, stuck in the spokes of tires, the kind that didn’t go away, no matter how warm it got. Denny got it now, what New England really was, how haunted by this principle of the weather, how it defined the people here. He finally understood.

There was a knock at the door, and Denny rose to open it. Before the welcome mat at his home—her home, really—were two men he had never seen before. They held winter beanies in their hands, out of respect, he assumed. He almost laughed. Anna had a distaste for authority, and she particularly disliked the police. She would have found this funny, the cops there, at her house, where her BLACK LIVES MATTER sign still lived on the frosty lawn. How many times had she uttered responses under her breath to “thin blue line” flags as they drove through neighborhoods populated by officers? How many times had he convinced her not to share her feelings about the cops at dinner parties or social gatherings? It had been a mistake, he now realized, reining her in all those times, telling her what she should or shouldn’t say. There had been no real point, after all. You end up with the cops at your door either way.

Denny looked out at those cops now, studied the men he had never before met, despite his own trips down to the police station in search of his wife, this apparition.

“Mr. Plummer?” the taller of the pair asked. “Are you Mr. Plummer?”

“Denny,” he said, shifting his weight.

“Do you mind?” the second officer said. He was short and kind of squat with a mess of graying hair plastered across his forehead. He was gesturing inside. “Can we?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Denny said.

Denny walked the officers inside, past the small foyer, with its convex eagle mirror that Anna bought because it reminded her of the one that she had as a child in her ship captain’s home, and past the vintage bread box that she picked up well before she had children and that she had always used to store dog leashes and treats. He brought the officers into their kitchen, where reminders of his wife were also everywhere: Here were the blue velour bar stools that they quarreled over at West Elm (too expensive, too hard to clean); here, in the center of the island, in a blue ceramic bowl, were the potatoes she bought for last Sunday’s dinner but never ended up cooking. The officers stood around the kitchen island.

“Can I get you anything?” Denny asked, though it was mostly a formality. They demurred. They seemed equally unaccustomed to accepting things at people’s homes.

“Mr. Plummer,” the taller officer began.

“Denny,” he corrected.

“Right, Denny.” The officer cleared his throat. “Sir, we’re here about your wife.”

But Denny already knew this. He wanted to fast-forward, like in the old days, the VHS days, when you could watch everything move forward quickly, with white lines striped through the video. It was less traumatic that way. He wanted to move through this conversation three times as fast and without sound, get to the part where they hand him the information that matters, dispense with the courtesies. They were just doing their jobs, of course. They couldn’t help it.

“We have, ah, located a body,” the shorter officer said. “We believe we have located your wife.”

Body first, wife second. That order was striking. Death eclipsed life. Denny could feel every muscle in his body vibrating, a will to stay upright. Somewhat resistant to emotion by nature, he was now fighting his own synapses, at war with impulse. No one tells you how you turn to jelly, he thought. No one tells you how you just want to sink into the floor.

“No,” Denny said. “That’s not possible.” S. . .