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Summary
Summary
"Two terrific female characters, both with secrets. Add Michael Robotham's clean prose and whipcrack pacing. The result? A book you won't be able to put down, although you may occasionally want to hide your eyes." --Stephen King
"A premium delivery." -- People
Meghan doesn't know Agatha, but Agatha knows Meghan. And the one thing Agatha looks forward to each day is catching a glimpse of her, the effortlessly chic customer at the grocery store where she works stocking shelves. Meghan has it all: two adorable children, a handsome and successful husband, a happy marriage, a beautiful house, and a popular parenting blog that Agatha reads with devotion each night as she waits for her absent boyfriend, the father of the baby growing inside her, to return her calls.
Yet if Agatha could look beyond the gloss and trappings of Meghan's "perfect life," she'd see the flaws and doubts. Meghan has her secrets too, especially one that she dare not ever tell. Soon the lives of these two women will collide in the most spellbinding and intimate of ways, until their secrets are exposed by one shocking act that cannot be undone. From internationally bestselling author Michael Robotham, The Secrets She Keeps is a dark, exquisite, and twisted page-turner so full of surprises, you'll find it impossible to put down.
Author Notes
Michael Robotham was born in Australia in 1960. In 1979, he moved to Sydney and became a cadet journalist on an afternoon newspaper. He spent the next fourteen years working for newspapers in Australia, Europe, Africa and America. As a senior feature writer for the United Kingdom's Mail on Sunday, he was among the first people to view the letters and diaries of Czar Nicholas II and his wife Empress Alexandra discovered in the Moscow State Archives in 1991. He also gained access to Stalin's Hitler files, which had been missing for nearly fifty years.
He left journalism in 1993 to become a ghostwriter, collaborating with politicians, pop stars, psychologists, adventurers and show business personalities to write their autobiographies. He also writes novels including The Suspect, The Night Ferry, Lost, and The Secrets She Keeps. He won numerous awards including the Ned Kelly Award for the Crime Novel of the Year in 2005 for The Drowning Man, the Ned Kelly Award for the Crime Novel of the Year in 2008 for Shatter, the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger award for best crime novel in 2015 for Life or Death, and the 2018 Australian Book Industry Awards, General fiction book of the year for The Secrets She Keeps.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in London, this emotionally charged domestic thriller from Edgar-finalist Robotham (Life or Death) sets up dueling narratives between part-time supermarket shelf stocker Agatha and her frequent customer, Meg. Both women are in their third trimester of pregnancy-but that's where the similarities end. Beautiful, elegant Meg has two perfect children and a handsome and successful husband. Agatha's life has been filled with horror and heartbreak: she's been raped, been forced to give a child up for adoption, suffered a miscarriage, divorced, and watched her young half-brother die after being hit by a car. Both mothers-to-be are hiding dark secrets, and when Meg's baby is stolen just hours after being born, the media frenzy that ensues threatens to expose Agatha and Meg's respective transgressions and destroy their lives. Despite the disturbing subject matter, Robotham's narrative is intimate and insightful. Brilliantly rendered characters, relentless tension, and numerous plot twists make this a winner. Agent: Richard Pine, Inkwell Management. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Robotham, best known for his gritty Joe O'Loughlin crime thrillers (Close Your Eyes, 2016, etc.), makes a successful literary departure in this engrossing psychological thriller focusing on two women and the dark places their relationship leads.Every day, Agatha watches Meg from the window of the London grocery store where she works. Meg is pregnant, beautiful, and privileged, with a handsome husband, two lively children, and a perfect homeand a popular blog where she memorializes it all. For Agatha, who wants a life like Meg's and instead comes home to an empty and shabby apartment, life would be infinitely better if she could lure Hayden back. A communications technician in the Royal Navy, Hayden dumped her when he deployed and now wants nothing to do with her, but Agatha has yet to tell him that she's pregnant, due in early December, as is Meg. Meanwhile, Meg's husband, Jack, a TV sports journalist, has been less than enthusiastic about Meg's current pregnancy, and their marriagedespite what Agatha thinksis far from perfect. Meg is also hiding a secret: she slept with a family friend and former lover, Simon, following a big fight with Jack. Agatha takes the opportunity of their joint pregnancies to talk to Meg one day, and they soon grow better acquainted, but Agatha keeps Meg in the dark when it comes to her own troubled past as well as the real reason she and Hayden aren't together and why having a baby is so important to her. Told in Agatha's and Meg's alternating, distinct first-person voices, the story of how the women's lives overlap as Meg's marriage and Agatha's life both unravel starts with a gradual glimpse into the two women's worlds, then escalates into something much more sinister. Robotham captures the physical misery that often characterizes late-term pregnancies and writes convincingly in a female voice, but where this book excels is in the increasing sense of threat he crafts so well. With its interestingly imperfect characters and escalating sense of urgency, this novel will keep you reading as fast as you can. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
ANGELIC LITTLE BABIES make idiots of us all. A pregnant, unmarried grocery store clerk named Agatha dotes on her unborn child in THE SECRETS SHE KEEPS (Scribner, $26), Michael Robotham's insightful psychological thriller about the joys and fears of impending motherhood. Agatha is consumed by all things prenatal, and especially the pregnancy of Meghan, a well-offand beautifully turned-out married customer, also in her third trimester, who represents perfection to a woman whose absent boyfriend wants no part of fatherhood. Dreaming of a future life when she and Meghan have become friends, Agatha makes plans: "We'll do yoga classes and swap recipes and meet for coffee every Friday morning with our mothers' group." When Agatha and Meghan, who alternate as narrators, realize that their due dates both fall in December, a bond is forged. Meghan welcomes Agatha into her home and invites the kind of intimate exchanges she'll come to regret when her new acquaintance turns out to be a stalker. "I know her timetable, her friends, her habits and the rhythm of her life," Agatha says proudly. But if Agatha isn't as innocent as Meghan thinks, Meghan isn't as wonderful as Agatha fantasizes. Both women, in fact, are clutching secrets that can ruin friendships, destroy marriages and shatter lives. Agatha is the more interesting character, with her harrowing history and desperate yearning for a child to heal the wounds of past traumas. Her neediness may be fanatical and her assumptions psychotic, but her suffering is real. And she's still bitter about mothers who thoughtlessly assume that some women are simply "too selfish or too choosy" to have children. But beneath the chattiness of her parenting blog, "Mucky Kids," Meghan's uneasy narrative voice registers her fears for her newborn son and her own private qualms. "I am a cliché," she admits. "My blog sums up my existence - safe, uncontentious, and shallow." Both women are extremely articulate, but when the plot takes an unspeakable turn, they're no longer able to hide behind words. OF ALL THE places where you really do not want to come across a couple of nut cases with guns, a zoo full of wild animals would be high on the list. Gin Phillips taps into that primal fear with FIERCE KINGDOM (Viking, $25), a heartthumping thriller about a mother who finds herself and her 4-yearold son trapped when two marksmen start hunting down visitors. Joan is about to leave the park with Lincoln, a dear child who entertains himself by reciting college football chants, when the sound of shots sends her backtracking into the deeper parts of the zoo. Phillips dutifully sketches out a back story for the gunmen, but once Joan's maternal instincts kick in, she summons her survival skills, and the thrust of the narrative turns to her nerve-plucking race for safety, past "wild things in boxes." Packing 40 pounds of human cub on her hip, she sprints from one habitat to the next and in the face of unexpected danger gives new meaning to the term "tiger mom." Compressed into a little over three hours, the story flies by like a gazelle being chased by a lion and is easily consumed in a single sitting. VICTORIAN LADIES IN distress always consult Sherlock Holmes. Their plebeian sisters must settle for the seedy sleuth in Mick Finlay's first mystery, ARROWOOD (Mira, paperback, $15.99), who lives in a squalid district of South London and caters to clients like Miss Caroline Cousture, whose brother has disappeared from his kitchen job at the Barrel of Beef chophouse. William Arrowood is a Falstaffian fellow who lives behind a pudding shop and prides himself on being "an emotional agent, not a deductive agent," like his famous nemesis. "I see people," he boasts. "I see into their souls." His assistant, Norman Barnett, is content to study the filthy streets teeming with "nighttime people" who "stagger and shriek," blind with drink and despair. Gin is both medicine and religion for many of these slum dwellers, who privately believe that Jack the Ripper is "God's punishment for the drink." WOULDN'T A HAIRDRESSER know not to take a hair dryer into the bathtub? That's not the only thing fishy about the death of Lorna Belling, whose husband and lover are equally horrid in NEED YOU DEAD (Macmillan, $27.95), the latest mystery in a scrupulously maintained procedural series by Peter James. And of course, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, a decent and damned attractive senior officer with the Sussex Police, is too shrewd to write offLorna's death as a classic domestic abuse case. Despite the glaringly obvious clues pointing to her jealous husband, no Roy Grace mystery can be resolved without one of the detective's intense interviews, which he compares to "games of poker," having perfected the fine art of bluffing, along with the unnerving skill of reading a subject's body language. But he may have met his match in 10-year-old Bruno, the son he never knew he had until his first wife broke the news posthumously in a suicide note. Grace is a detective known for his human touch, but a moody little boy may prove to be his toughest challenge. MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.