Goodreads

Release date: July 12, 2022

Publisher: Forge

Genre: Mystery/Thriller

Synopsis:

Set in the upscale DC private school scene, where silence can easily be bought, Aggie Blum Thompson’s All the Dirty Secretsasks 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.

Review:

As soon as I saw this centered on an elite private school I was already interested and then add in a dual timeline with a past mystery and I was sold. Told in both past and present and mainly from Liza and her daughter Zoe’s viewpoints I was engaged by this, both in the past and the present timelines. The author managed to craft a compelling mystery as well as add in some timely issues that are seen in the news today. The pacing was solid with most of the action happening in the last quarter of the book and while some things were predictable I still found the journey to get to the end to be both enjoyable and pretty gripping.

Overall rating: 4/5

Thanks to the publisher for my review copy.