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Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. HTML: Every Secret Thing is a riveting story of love and murder, guilt and innocence, adult sins and childhood darkness. Two little girls banished from a neighborhood birthday party take a wrong turn down an unfamiliar Baltimore street�??and encounter an abandoned stroller with an infant inside. What happens next is shocking and terrible, and three families are irreparably destroyed. Seven years later, Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller, now eighteen, are released from "kid prison" to begin their lives over again. But the secrets swirling around the original crime continue to haunt the parents, the lawyers, the police�??all the adults in Alice and Ronnie's lives. And now another child has disappeared, under freakishly similar circumstances ..… (more)
User reviews
The Take-Away: I really thought that this would be tough to read, but the violence stayed off the pages. It was
Lippman is better known for her Tess Monaghan. I'm not familiar with them but would pick them up. The writing in this one was so fab that the others are probably good too.
Recommendation: If the subject matter seems too tough, try a different title. This author is worth it.
A waste of time better spent reading almost anything else.
Laura Lippman makes this stuff up, she must be a real charm to live with. She should purge her soul by researching and writing a novel about nice people doing nice things.
Alice and Ronnie were eleven years old when they happened across a baby in a stroller in front of a house. Convinced the baby had been abandoned, they took her, and were blamed for Olivia Barnes' death. Now, 7 years later, they've been released from "kid prison" to start their lives over. But when another child disappears, suspicion falls on the two young women.
But it's not just Alice and Ronnie's lives that have been altered. There is the detective who, as a police cadet enlisted in the search for Olivia Barnes, found the baby's body and is now one of the investigators on the current missing child case. There is also Alice's public defender lawyer who still thinks Alice got a raw deal, and Alice's mother, who seems to have perfected her own brand of denial. And finally, there is Olivia's mother. Cynthia Barnes never got over her baby's death, and her need for vengeance propels much of the action and the inevitability of the conclusion.
I enjoyed the book a lot, but felt at times, a bit manipulated. Lippman is careful to not tell us any detail before she's ready for us to know it. Yet by the end of the book, I felt as if I knew each character intimately and that's due to Lippman's engrossing, engaging prose. If you like a suspenseful page turner, you'll likely find it here.
Overall I enjoyed the story about these fractured people and how their lives intersected. Helen disturbed me the most and I think the narrator did a great job with her character. Her low self-esteem manifested itself in such bizarre ways that seemed to contradict and then override any maternal instinct she might have posessed. Alice, her daughter, was drawn a bit heavy-handed to be completely believable and I wasn't surprised to see her true self emerge in the end. Ronnie, while not always a sympathetic character, earned those feelings in the end, at least from me. Cynthia was a woman driven by her dark side just as much as Helen was. Nancy wasn't so clearly drawn as the rest. She kept harping on her former need for attention, but it didn't really come through since we were beyond its time frame. While it's not her best work, I think Lippman wrote an unusual story well.
At the age of 18, the two girls are released and instructed to have no contact with one another. Each girl is to try to build a new life for herself. But when babies start to disappear in situations startlingly similar to Alice and Ronnie's crime, people begin to wonder whether the two girls should have been released and what really happened to the baby the girls were charged with murdering.
Review: The premise of this novel is very intriguing. Two 11-year-old girls kill an infant, serve time in jail, are released, and then similar crimes begin to occur. I think, especially given the unfortunate events that occur in our society, children committing murder does hold a bit of fascination for the reader.
With that being said, I wasn't blown away by this novel. I enjoyed it, particularly the first half of the novel, but it ended up being one of those books that are more exciting in the dust jacket description than in execution.
The characters were well written. The plot was good. The writing style was very easy to fall into. This book was also a very quick read. There was just something lacking for me, though. It was missing that extra bit of oomph that would have pushed me from lukewarm to on fire.
If you are looking for a decent mystery novel with an unusual plot, definitely check this book out. I wouldn't steer anyone away from this book, but I might not guide them toward it either.
There are some quite surprising twists in the story, and that’s what makes it extra special for me. It’s hard for me to find a book with a plot that surprises me. This just cements Lippman’s place on my "Damn, She’s Good" list.
Every Secret Thing is a really good mystery with lots of twists. Some of the twists I anticipated in advance, but others took me by surprise. It is told through a variety of the characters’ views, sometimes switching from one to another too fast for my taste, but it does add more detail to the story. I hate to say it, but I didn’t really like any of the characters in Every Secret Thing, but I’m not sure Lippman wants the reader to like them. I did kind of like the detective, Nancy, but she wasn’t really well-developed enough to gain much investment from me. I didn’t trust either of the two girls, and I really didn’t like the mother of the baby that was killed in the beginning. She just seemed self-important, judgmental, and bossy. Alice’s mother seemed odd, and I wasn’t sure what to think about Alice’s lawyer, but I didn’t really like her either. The reporter obviously didn’t care about anyone other than herself and I never understood what had caused her to become stuck at such a low-level position to begin with. Despite the character issues, Every Secret Thing keeps you guessing, making you question what you think you already know. It had me racing to the end to find out if my suspicions were accurate or not. It was a thrilling ride and I was itching to know what the truth really was.
I recommend this one, with just a little complaint that the character POV change was too abrupt at times.
I'm really hoping that Lippman has a
Review: This was a good story but was draggy in parts. It was a nice change from Tess books.
This dark story from Lippman was inspired by a real crime in which two ten-year-old boys killed a three-year-old boy. In Every Secret Thing, the perpetrators are two eleven-year-old lower class white
Alice and Ronnie are each automatically released from prison at age eighteen, and simultaneously, a rash of child abductions occur. Most of the children reappear shortly after they are taken, until Maveen Little’s three-year-old girl is taken, and she doesn’t return.
Evaluation: Nothing is as straightforward as it seems in this story. Even the twists don’t resolve neatly; the book is in fact more like “real life” than one might want! Interestingly, almost all the characters are female. There is no romance to lighten the mood, nor actually much of anything that lightens the mood. This is a good book, but one that had me longing to go back to the brighter life of Tess Monaghan.
Note: This book won both the Anthony Award (for mystery novels) and the Barry Award (for crime novels) in 2004.