My Rating
I Don’t Forgive You by Aggie Blum Thompson was one of my favorite books last year and goes without saying that I was super excited to get a chance to read her next release All Our Dirty Secrets.
Much can be said about this book, there is a mystery in the present, and there is another cold case mystery of the past that is running in a parallel line but in effect, All Our Dirty Secrets talks about friendships and the pressure of private school education. The author carefully explores the relationships at the beginning of the story, we see the friendships between the adults that have been forged over for years, the best friends with whom you can forget everything else, and the be the individual whom they know inside out. There is also the friendship of the teenagers which is again analyzed against the backdrop of a private school education system where the financial and social differences can make or break one’s self-worth.
All The Dirty Secrets begins slowly, setting up the characters, giving us a glimpse of the dynamics between the friends and their children and a dual timeline story unfolds with the events that lead up to the death of Nikki. Aggie Blum Thomspon had offered a wild ride in her debut but in this one, the pacing is much more steady and the mystery becomes a race to the finish from the middle part of the book. The twists and turns in the story that Liza and her daughter Zoe uncover causes one shocking revelation after another keeping the reader on tenterhook towards the end. Though not really the jaw-dropping surprise that I had expected at the climax and kind of predictable plot, be assured that Aggie Blum Thomson knows how to grab the reader’s attention, and All The Dirty Secrets has more than one dirty secret to be unearthed..
Many thanks to Net Galley, Forge Books, and the author for a chance to read and review this book. All opinions are expressed voluntarily.
Set in the upscale DC private school scene, where silence can easily be bought, Aggie Blum Thompson’s All the Dirty Secrets asks how far you would go to protect your status and your family, and if some secrets should ever be revealed.
One warm summer night twenty-five years ago, Liza Gold and her friends celebrated their high school graduation with a party on the beach. It should have been the best night of their lives, only one of them never came back out of the ocean.
The tragedy haunted Liza Gold for years. Now, she’s a recently divorced working mom struggling to connect with her standoffish teenager daughter Zoe when history repeats itself. Another young woman has drowned at Beach Week, and this time the victim is Zoe’s secret best friend.
Liza begins to suspect that the two deaths are somehow related, which causes her to face hard truths and take an unflinching look at the people she’s called her closest friends for the past two decades. She must discover what really happened to both women before it’s too late.
Please note: This book contains material about sexual violence.
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