During a swimming accident, nine-year-old Sebastian Duncan stops breathing. While others attempt to resuscitate him, he has a near-death experience, wherein he meets his mother, who died the previous year from an overdose of sleeping pills. She tells Sebastian that her own death was not the suicide that people believed it was and that he must return to tell his grandmother that she was in fact murdered. At the insistence of Sebastian's grandmother, chief investigator Arlene Flynn is assigned the task of re-opening the year-old case to determine whether the death was the suicide it was originally believed to be or if there is a very clever murderer on the loose. Did the boy actually have a legitimate near-death experience, or did he simply suppress some memory of the murder, only to have the trauma of his accident bring it back up to the surfact? With no evidence to indicate murder, no credible witness making such a claim, and a great deal of political pressure, Arlene Flynn must tackle the most challenging case of her career in H. Paul Jeffers's thrilling What Mommy Said.