Dirty Little Secrets – Jo Spain

About the book: 

Six neighbours, six secrets, six reasons to want Olive Collins dead.

In the exclusive gated community of Withered Vale, people’s lives appear as perfect as their beautifully manicured lawns. Money, success, privilege – the residents have it all. Life is good.

There’s just one problem.

Olive Collins’ dead body has been rotting inside number four for the last three months. Her neighbours say they’re shocked at the discovery but nobody thought to check on her when she vanished from sight.

The police start to ask questions and the seemingly flawless facade begins to crack. Because, when it comes to Olive’s neighbours, it seems each of them has something to hide, something to lose and everything to gain from her death.

My Review: Dirty Little Secrets is Jo Spain’s latest psychological thriller and as I loved her previous book The Confession I was very excited to start this one.

OMG I absolutely LOVED this book and devoured it in a day – I even woke up at 3.30am thinking about the book and finished it at 4.30am because I couldn’t wait to find out more.

In a secured, affluent gated community are 7 houses with seven neighbours all with HUGE secrets.  When one of the neighbours, Olive Collins is found dead inside her house, having been left to rot for 3 months, the police start to investigate how, why and when and more importantly realise that almost every neighbour had reason to want Olive dead.

I absolutely LOVED each character narrating their version of the truth and Olive telling us her side of the story from beyond the grave was utter genuis.  If you can imagine Desperate Housewives directed by Quentin Tarantino then you might get an inkling of how dark and deliciously disturbing Dirty Little Secrets is.

Fabulous characters, loved all their back stories, loved the relationship between the 2 police detectives, loved the pace, the humour, the style of writing, the amusing twists and turns along the way and I am pretty confident this is going into my Top Ten of 2019 – 100% recommended.

About the author: Jo Spain’s first novel, top ten bestseller With our Blessing, was one of seven finalists in the Richard and Judy Search for a Bestseller Competition. It was named as an Irish Times crime fiction book of the year by Declan Burke. Beneath the Surface (2016) and Sleeping Beauties (2017), the second and third in the DI Tom Reynolds series followed, to further critical acclaim. Her standalone thriller, The Confession, released in January 2018, became a number one bestseller and sold in multiple territories. Jo is releasing the fourth Tom Reynolds, The Darkest Place, in 2018 and a new standalone Dirty Little Secrets in 2019.

Jo also writes for TV and is the co-writer of new series Taken Down.

A graduate of Trinity College Dublin, Jo lives in Dublin with her husband and their four young children. Jo previously worked as a policy advisor in the Irish parliament and as vice-chair of the business body InterTrade Ireland.

Jo’s debut novel is set against a background of the infamous Irish Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby homes. The author’s own father was born in one such home in Dublin and the novel’s backdrop was constructed based on the in-depth research she undertook while attempting to trace her family roots.

Her favourite writers include Pierre LeMaitre, Fred Vargas, Louise Penny, Jo Nesbo, Ann Cleeves, B.A. Paris, Elizabeth Haynes and Agatha Christie.

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