Title: The Secret Next DoorAuthor: Rebecca Taylor
Published by: Sourcebooks Landmark on Nov. 9, 2021
Genres: Mystery/Thriller
Pages: 352
Format: Paperback
Source: Sourcebooks Landmark
Book Rating: 8/10
How well do you really know your neighbors?
Alyson Tinsdale is giving her son the childhood she never had: a stable family, a loving home, and a great school in a safe neighborhood.
Bonnie Sloan is the neighborhood matriarch. With her oldest son headed to Yale, and her youngest starting kindergarten, Bonnie is now pursuing her own long-held political aspirations despite private family struggles.
When the open space behind some of the most expensive homes gets slated for development into an amusement facility, the neighborhood becomes deeply divided. The personal pressures and community conflicts ratchet with every passing day, but it’s when a thirteen-year-old is found dead beside the neighborhood lake that simmering tensions boil over into panic.
Gossip flows, lies are exposed, and accusations are made as cracks run through the community’s once solid foundations. The neighborhood’s faith in exterior appearances is eclipsed by the secrets every house keeps. And as Bonnie and Alyson fight to keep their children safe and their messy personal lives from becoming neighborhood knowledge, it becomes clear that their neighbors might not be who they appear to be.
Fans of Lisa Jewell and Wendy Walker will love this fast-paced, engrossing novel that reminds us that nothing and no one are ever as perfect as they seem.
Review:
Edgy, eerie, and tight!
The Secret Next Door is a captivating, psychological thrill ride that introduces us to Alyson, a young mother who is excited to move into a new home with her husband and five-year-old son until the neighbours of this coveted community seem a be a little more distant and unfriendly than they first appeared, her son has more than a few issues fitting in at the local school, her marriage starts to become unbearably strained, and the thirteen-year-old-son of one of the most popular families in the area suddenly turns up dead.
The writing is brisk and intense. The characters are consumed, overwhelmed, and flawed. And the plot is a suspenseful, sinister tale of secrets, deception, gossip, tragedy, politics, suspicions, revelations, mayhem, fractured relationships, violence, and murder.
Overall, The Secret Next Door is an atmospheric, devious, unnerving page-turner by Taylor that does a wonderful job of highlighting just how easily people can sometimes allow themselves to be psychologically and emotionally manipulated, and reminds us that even the people we think we know so well often have deep, dark secrets they choose to hide.
This book is available now.
Pick up a copy from your favourite retailer or from one of the following links.
Thank you to Sourcebooks Landmark for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.
About Rebecca Taylor
Rebecca Taylor was born to a single British teen during a February blizzard in Green Bay, Wisconsin. When she was three, her mother met and married a US Marine. Like many children of military families, Rebecca spent the next fifteen years of her life moving. From Canada to Okinawa, and then all over the United States, she attended eight different schools before graduating high school.
Given that, she didn’t really understand how people managed to stay in one place for more than twelve months. So, she spent her twenties working as an international flight attendant while pursuing degrees in psychology and sociology. It wasn’t until she was pregnant with her first child and working on her graduate degree in psychology that she began writing fiction.
Rebecca has since written eight novels: ASCENDANT won the Colorado Book Award in 2014, and AFFECTIVE NEEDS was a finalist for the Romance Writers of America RITA Award in 2017. HER PERFECT LIFE was her first work of psychological fiction and was published by Sourcebooks in 2020.
THE SECRET NEXT DOOR will release from Sourcebooks on November 9th, 2021.
Thankfully, Rebecca did eventually learn how to sit and stay. She currently lives in sunny Colorado with her husband, two teens, two dogs, two cats, two fish…there seems to be something about the number two for her.
Photo by Yvonne Min.
This sounds really good. Added to TBR list. Thanks for your review Zoe