It’s Cleo’s birthday, and she’s turning 18. After a very difficult year, she’s ready to put the past behind her, graduate from high school, and head to Michigan State to study forensics.
There’s just one problem. She can’t put the past behind her. Because one year ago on her birthday, her brother Connor put together a rafting trip for her and her friends. Seven people left on the trip, but only six came back. Cleo’s boyfriend Declan didn’t make it out of the river. It was called an accident, but Cleo knew that there was more to it than that. She knew the truth. She was there when he fell into the river, but she couldn’t do anything to help because she didn’t know how to swim.
Now she just wants to forget and move forward, but someone else won’t let her. When Cleo gets out of the shower, she finds a small white box with a green ribbon on it. At first, she thinks it’s her best friend Hope who left the gift, but Hope swears it’s not her. Connor says it wasn’t him. And when Cleo opens it, she finds the first clue in a mystery scavenger hunt.
As Cleo and Hope set out to find where the first clue takes them, Cleo tries to figure out who is behind the clues. The fact that she was in the shower when the first clue showed up feels vaguely threatening, but Cleo can’t figure out who would come after her. The only person she knows of who she feels threatened by died in that river . . . or did he?
As each clue in the hunt takes Cleo to a place that was significant in her relationship with Declan, she goes back through their time together, from when he moved into their house, just a friend of her brother who needed a place to stay for a while to their first kiss to the first time he hit her. All the memories are coming back, and the fear is making the hair on the back of her neck stand up.
But she has a scholarship to Michigan State, and her brother Connor just got an internship in the state prosecutor’s office, and Hope has plans to go to Vassar, so Cleo knows that if the truth comes out about what happened on the rafting trip, it could jeopardize all of their futures. But the person behind the clues hints that he or she has something that could ruin them all, that they are willing to release that information to social media or even to the police if Cleo stops following the clues. So Cleo has to keep going. She has to go through every painful memory, every scar, every lie, and every secret, until she finds out who is behind the hunt, even if it’s the last thing she’ll ever do.
Seven Dirty Secrets is the latest thriller from Natalie D. Richards, a master storyteller who can keep you guessing until the end. With realistic characters and taut plotting, Richards weaves together the kind of thriller that keeps you engaged until the very end.
I got sucked into Seven Dirty Secrets, and I didn’t want to stop reading until I found out what was really going on. Throughout this story, there are always several possibilities of who could be pulling the strings, so there was never a dull moment. There are nuances in the story, layers of secrets, lies that characters tell each other and themselves, all twisting together into a thriller that won’t let you go. Don’t start reading this one late at night!
Egalleys for Seven Dirty Secrets were provided by Sourcebooks Fire through NetGalley with many thanks.
