story full of secrets

Holly Sinclair’s last noel didn’t do well. In fact, it did so badly that she had to downsize her life in New York and move into her mother’s seaside cottage in Massachusetts. She hadn’t been back since her mother passed away, and although the place is run down, Holly doesn’t have a lot of choices. She needs to spend some time there focusing on her next novel, and it needs to be a beach thriller that takes publishing by storm or her time as an author might be over. Her agent is almost done with her, her publisher is almost done with her, and she has no choice but to figure out a bestseller.

But being back in Massachusetts isn’t easy for Holly. This is the cottage she grew up in. It’s where she and her older sister Anna spent summers. It’s where her sister was killed. It’s where the case is still open, as the local police never found out who had done it. But it’s also where Holly had started writing a beach thriller all those years ago, based on what was happening in Anna’s life that summer. Holly is considering going back to that novel she started writing almost twenty years ago, but there is a problem. She has no ending. In order to know how her book ends, she has to figure out what happened to her sister all those years ago, and that means investigating Anna’s boyfriend at the time.

It had been the night of the Barefoot Beach Ball, a fancy party put on by the wealthiest family in town, the Carmichaels. Maeve had insisted on everything being perfect that night, and she made Anna very nervous. Anna had been working as a server, but she felt awkward and inadequate, and when she wandered away for a minute to catch her breath, she had met Maeve’s son. Conrad had been tall and handsome and charming in a way that captured Anna’s attention immediately. He was captivated too, and the two started dating. Weeks later, when Anna’s body was found on the beach, Conrad had been investigated, but he’d had an alibi. Holly had always wondered if the local police had just been covering for the family, or if he had really been innocent all along.

While working on her new novel and trying to find an ending to her sister’s story, Holly has other stresses to deal with. The cottage needs some work, and she can’t afford a handyman. She has a real estate agent hovering nearby like a vulture, ready to step in and sell of her family legacy to the highest bidder. And she catches a teenaged girl camping out in her attic.

Jade Jensen had some to Massachusetts to find her mother. She had been adopted, but she never really felt like she fit in with the family, so when she was old enough, she set off for the beach. She carried with her a jade necklace that had the name of the town on it, and she’s determined to find out where the necklace had been bought and try to use that information to trace her birth mother. She had found Holly’s cottage, and it had been empty, so she camped out upstairs. And when Holly moved in, she had nowhere else to go.

Holly agreed to let her stay, but she did ask that Jade get a job to keep her out of trouble. Jade isn’t sure where to find a job until she has an inauspicious meeting with Conrad Carmichael himself, and he offers her a job at their house. But when Jade’s curiosity puts her in danger at the Carmichael mansion, Holly knows she needs to find her sister’s killer fast, or it could be the last beach summer for both women.

Beach Thriller is a crazy ride of a summer read, with long-buried secrets slowly bubbling up to the surface. The story of Anna was a slow burn, and the wait to find out what had happened to her was excruciating, in the best way. I wanted all the answers, but I didn’t want them to come too fast. I savored the time it took to get the whole story.

I listened to Beach Thriller on audio, where narrators Emily Shaffer, Jane Oppenheimer, Jennifer Pickens, and Megan Tusing brought the story to life. Each narrator added to the story, bringing breath and emotion to each of the characters they embodied. I love it when a story has multiple narrators, and these women worked together to add depth and complexity to the story, moving around in time, and bringing all the feels to the party. I had a great time with this audio book.

Egalleys for Beach Thriller were provided by St. Martin’s Press and a copy of the audio book was provided by Macmillan Audio, both through NetGalley, with many thanks, but the opinions are mine.