Her Secret Son by Hannah Mary McKinnon

How far would you go to protect the ones you love…when they may not be yours to protect?

When Josh’s longtime partner, Grace, dies in a tragic accident, he is left with a mess of grief—and full custody of her seven-year-old son, Logan. While not his biological father, Josh has been a dad to Logan in every way that counts, and with Grace gone, Logan needs him more than ever.

Wanting to do right by Logan, Josh begins the process of becoming his legal guardian—something that seems suddenly urgent, though Grace always brushed it off as an unnecessary formality. But now, as Josh struggles to find the paperwork associated with Logan’s birth, he begins to wonder whether there were more troubling reasons for Grace’s reluctance to make their family official.

As he digs deeper into the past of the woman he loved, Josh soon finds that there are many dark secrets to uncover, and that the truth about where Logan came from is much more sinister than he could have imagined…

Tightly paced and brimming with tension, Her Secret Son is a heartbreakingly honest portrait of a family on the edge of disaster and a father desperate to hold on to the boy who changed his life.


The blurb says it all; Josh’s longtime partner, Grace, dies in an accident, leaving Logan, her seven year old son, in Josh’s care. Josh wants to adopt Logan, has wanted to for a long time. But Grace’s death makes it an imperative. Josh isn’t Logan’s father, and he fears that Logan could be taken from him.

But things turn out to be harder than Josh thinks. And after running into one roadblock after another, he comes to the realization that there was a lot he didn’t know about Grace.

So begins his quest to find out the truth of Grace and Logan. There are several twists and turns, as whatever can go wrong does, and the ending was quite a surprise.

I liked the book, but for the longest time I didn’t like Josh. He’s something of a screw-up, and he whines a lot, at times feeling more sorry for himself than for Logan. He needs to do a lot of growing up. The book is written in the first person, which probably doesn’t help; Josh’s insecurities are right in your face. Writing in the third person might have toned that down a bit. Still, all in all, it was an interesting and enjoyable read.




( Mount TBR 2020 Book Links )