All the Dirty Secrets by Aggie Blum Thompson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
**3.5-stars rounded up**
25-years ago, Liza and her best friends, Nikki, Shelby and Whitney, took part in a traditional celebration in their area known as Beach Week.
The girls attended a posh private school, Washington Prep, in D.C. and Beach Week is essentially their way of celebrating their graduation, all without adult supervision, with lots of substances and the use of their parent’s beach houses.
Things are known to get pretty wild, but even the locals seem to disregard what’s happening. These privileged kids get away with everything.
Unfortunately, this time, one of them doesn’t come out unscathed. Nikki never made it back from their midnight swim and her death has haunted Liza all these years.
Now Liza has her own daughter, Zoe, at Washington Prep and while her Mom is away on a Girls Weekend at the beach, Zoe takes advantage and slips off to the beach herself for her own Beach Week celebration.
Even though Zoe is an underclassman, she gets invited along to Beach Week as a guest of an older girl named, Emery, who graduated from Washington Prep last year.
Liza only discovers that Zoe has sneaked away to the beach when she receives a call from the local police.
Zoe is at the station extremely distressed after discovering Emery’s dead body on the beach. She says Emery had gone off to meet up with someone, but she doesn’t know who. The police assert it’s just another Beach Week drowning.
Liza is completely floored by this news. She can’t believe Zoe would lie and take off on her own like this. More disturbing though is another mysterious death of a young girl from Washington Prep. Is it just a horrific coincidence, or is there something more at play?
In All the Dirty Secrets, Aggie Blum Thompson successfully weaves together a wicked tale of privilege, lies, deception and murder.
This is one twisted tale and frankly, I love to see that. The more twisted the better. In this case, the narrative started out quite slow for me. It took me a while to become engaged.
Initially, I found some of the characters to be quite annoying, particularly how Zoe talked to her Mom and I wasn’t sure if I could push through.
Fortunately, I was listening to the audiobook and the narrators did a great job keeping me engaged enough to proceed and I’m so glad for that.
About the time that Liza heads into the police station to collect Miss Sassy-Mouth Zoe, I became truly captivated. From there, I couldn’t put it down.
I really enjoyed how Blum Thompson formatted this story. I always enjoy dual timelines and POVs. In this narrative we follow Liza’s group during their high school Beach Week and the events surround Nikki’s death, as well as Liza’s present perspective and Zoe’s present perspective.
This allowed the reveals to hit one after another, helping the story to get rolling. Just when I thought I knew it all, something would be exposed that would have my jaw on the floor. I couldn’t believe the dirt I was digging through by the end; my goodness.
There were some bad actors in this story, that’s for sure!
Overall, I had fun with this. It’s a great Summer Thriller. I would definitely recommend it and look forward to picking up more from this author in the future.
Thank you so much to the publisher, Forge Books and Macmillan Audio, for providing me with copies to read and review. I really appreciate it!
