Happy publication day to Samantha Hayes and ‘Tell Me A Secret’! It’s no secret that I am one of the bloggers who have the pleasure of kicking off the blog tour today, and it’s also not a secret that I am reviewing the book! Huge thanks to Bookouture for the blog tour invite and the ARC. Here is my review:
Tell her all your secrets and she’ll tell you all her lies…
Everything in Lorna’s life runs like clockwork, from her 6 a.m. morning run to the strict 60-minute counselling sessions she gives. It’s the only way she can deal with the terrible secret she carries.
When a new client arrives for his first appointment, Lorna feels her perfect life unravel in a matter of seconds. It’s Andrew, the man she’s spent the last year desperately trying to forget. It seems he can’t forget her either…
Against her better judgement she anonymously contacts him on a dating site. Messaging him could mean the end of her marriage and her career, but she needs to know if his motives are genuine.
When Andrew is found dead in his home, grief quickly turns to fear when messages from him continue to arrive on Lorna’s phone. Somebody knows her secret and wants to use it to destroy everything she has.
Will she risk her family and her sanity to keep her secret? Will she risk her life…?
What does TWG think?
Having loved Samantha Hayes’ previous novel, ‘The Reunion’, I nearly wet my pants in excitement when I found out about her new release, ‘Tell Me A Secret’.
Let me just get this out of the way first – I wasn’t taken with the first half of the book as, for me personally, I struggled to grab hold of the grit and the oomph despite the author writing a storyline with a lot of rollercoasters in it. I appreciated the red herrings, the uncertain characters with their uncertain personalities, but for a while I did find myself waiting for things to start happening.
However, and yes, that is a big HOWEVER; just a little way after the halfway point things started to take off. ‘Tell Me A Secret’ seemed to go from 0-100 in a matter of seconds, making me react with an almighty gasp. I didn’t see THAT coming but by golly was it welcomed!
‘Tell Me A Secret’ is a book which is best to be read with your head in the sand. The author drip feeds her readers vital pieces of information as the storyline progresses, whilst also throwing in a bucketful of red herrings to keep her readers on their toes as well. Lorna is such a firecracker of a character – I honestly couldn’t keep up with her multiple personalities, but they did make for excellent reading in the latter half of the book.
I thought the suspense was written well with the author whacking it up a notch further into the book. For me, the last half of the book was outstanding as the pace was on point, the grit was overflowing, and the intense nature of the storyline was through the roof. Samantha Hayes is exceptional at writing complex, and intrusive characters who make their marks on readers in the most colourful of ways.
‘Tell Me A Secret’ and I may not have gotten off to the best of starts, but I am so pleased that I persevered as I ended up thoroughly enjoying this twister of a novel. It’s shocking, it’s memorable, it’s addictive – but shhhh, I’ve just told you a secret ;).
About the author.
Samantha Hayes grew up in Warwickshire, left school at sixteen, avoided university and took jobs ranging from private detective to barmaid to fruit picker and factory worker. She lived on a kibbutz, and spent time living in Australia and the USA, before finally becoming a crime-writer.
Her writing career began when she won a short story competition in 2003 and her ninth novel, THE REUNION, was published in February 2018. Her novels are family-based psychological thrillers, with the emphasis being on ‘real life fiction’. She focuses on current issues and sets out to make her readers ask, ‘What if this happened to me or my family?’
Tell Me A Secret is out now!
To find out more, visit her website www.samanthahayes.co.uk
Or connect with Samantha on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/SamanthaHayesAuthor
And she’s on Twitter @samhayes
The Writing Garnet 
I heard this was a fantastic book! Great review,
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