Twenty-five years ago, tragedy struck when Liza and her friends went to the beach, and one didn’t make it in after her midnight swim. Now, another young woman has died in a similar way, and this time it was a friend of Liza’s daughter that died.

All the Dirty Secrets is told using multiple points of view and multiple timelines. The POVs are Liza and her teen daughter, Zoe. The timelines are present day and twenty-five years earlier. Liza suspects the two deaths are related somehow. To find the truth, she has to take a hard look at those closest to her.

This started as a slow-building novel, but picked up the pace around the middle of the book. All the Dirty Secrets is a suspenseful mystery of secrets and deception. A good read for fans of this genre.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

**3.5-stars rounded up**

25-years ago, Liza and her best friends, Nikki, Shelby and Whitney, took part in a traditional celebration in their area known as Beach Week. The girls attended a posh private school, Washington Prep, in D.C. and Beach Week is essentially their way of celebrating their graduation, all without adult supervision, with lots of substances and the use of their parent's beach houses.

Things are known to get pretty wild, but even the locals seem to disregard what's happening. These privileged kids get away with everything. Unfortunately, this time, one of them doesn't come out unscathed. Nikki never made it back from their midnight swim and her death has haunted Liza all these years.

Now Liza has her own daughter, Zoe, at Washington Prep and while her Mom is away on a Girls Weekend at the beach, Zoe takes advantage and slips off to the beach herself for her own Beach Week celebration. Even though Zoe is an underclassman, she gets invited along to Beach Week as a guest of an older girl named, Emery, who graduated from Washington Prep last year. Liza only discovers that Zoe has sneaked away to the beach when she receives a call from the local police.

Zoe is at the station extremely distressed after discovering Emery's dead body on the beach. She says Emery had gone off to meet up with someone, but she doesn't know who. The police assert it's just another Beach Week drowning.

Liza is completely floored by this news. She can't believe Zoe would lie and take off on her own like this. More disturbing though is another mysterious death of a young girl from Washington Prep. Is it just a horrific coincidence, or is there something more at play?

In All the Dirty Secrets, Aggie Blum Thompson successfully weaves together a wicked tale of privilege, lies, deception and murder. This is one twisted tale and frankly, I love to see that. The more twisted the better. In this case, the narrative started out quite slow for me. It took me a while to become engaged.

Initially, I found some of the characters to be quite annoying, particularly how Zoe talked to her Mom and I wasn't sure if I could push through. Fortunately, I was listening to the audiobook and the narrators did a great job keeping me engaged enough to proceed and I'm so glad for that. About the time that Liza heads into the police station to collect Miss Sassy-Mouth Zoe, I became truly captivated. From there, I couldn't put it down.

I really enjoyed how Blum Thompson formatted this story. I always enjoy dual timelines and POVs. In this narrative we follow Liza's group during their high school Beach Week and the events surround Nikki's death, as well as Liza's present perspective and Zoe's present perspective.

This allowed the reveals to hit one after another, helping the story to get rolling. Just when I thought I knew it all, something would be exposed that would have my jaw on the floor. I couldn't believe the dirt I was digging through by the end; my goodness. There were some bad actors in this story, that's for sure!

Overall, I had fun with this. It's a great Summer Thriller. I would definitely recommend it and look forward to picking up more from this author in the future. Thank you so much to the publisher, Forge Books and Macmillan Audio, for providing me with copies to read and review. I really appreciate it!

📖BOOK REVIEW📖
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Does wealth come with benefits? Can money make you untouchable? They say it doesn't buy love or happiness…but maybe they’re wrong.

This psychological thriller exposes the wicked and superficial side of these wealthy and privileged characters. I’m always excited when a book hooks me from the beginning! But it’s impressive when the author keeps me glued to the pages throughout the entire book.

Aggie Blum Thompson has achieved that in this awesome tale of tragedy. Two teenage girls drown 25 years apart, at the same beach. It is a coincidence or something more sinister?

This is my second 5-star read by this excellent author and I highly recommend both books!

Thank you to NetGalley and Edelweiss for providing complimentary copies of this amazing ARC. All opinions are my own.

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As soon as I saw this centered on an elite private school I was already interested and then add in a dual timeline with a past mystery and I was sold. Told in both past and present and mainly from Liza and her daughter Zoe’s viewpoints I was engaged by this, both in the past and the present timelines. The author managed to craft a compelling mystery as well as add in some timely issues that are seen in the news today. The pacing was solid with most of the action happening in the last quarter of the book and while some things were predictable I still found the journey to get to the end to be both enjoyable and pretty gripping.

I received a free ARC of All the Dirty Secrets by Aggie Blum Thompson from Macmillan in an exchange for an honest review. I was a bit on the fence about requesting this book. I liked Ms. Thompson’s debut novel, I Don’t Forgive You, but it had flaws, especially how the plot was repeatedly advanced by the main character making completely unbelievable choices. But the book was entertaining, and so I decided to give her new book a try. I definitely made the right call.

In 1994, Nikki Montes drowned while at Beach Week celebrating her graduation from Washington Prep high school. Afterwards, her best friend, Liza Gold, and the rest of her friends were never quite the same. In the present, Liza’s 16-year-old daughter Zoe sneaks off to Beach Week, only to live through that same tragedy when her best friend Emery Blake drowns. But Zoe is convinced that Emery was murdered, and Liza slowly opens up to the possibility that Emery’s—and Nikki’s—deaths were not the accidents they seemed to be.

All the Dirty Secrets is a mystery at its core and is a very well plotted one. It’s a bit of a slow burn at first, establishing the characters and their relationships, before picking up speed in the middle. There are just the right number of flashbacks to the events of 1994, and each one advances not just the story of what happened then but also what is happening in the present. There are numerous possibilities about what happened to Nikki and Emery, and the book does a nice job exploring them before the answers are finally revealed.

But All the Dirty Secrets is better than the ordinary good mystery for several reasons. It paints a convincing portrait of the elite prep school scene, the diversity of families who attend those schools, and the various pressures placed on the students by their families. The strained relationship between Liza and teenage Zoe rings very true. The novel builds on a real life story that was in the news a few years ago (to say what would be too big a spoiler, but one of the characters talks about it somewhere in the middle of the book, so there’s no doubt the real life event was on the author’s mind). Most of all, the portrayals of friendships—from the intensity of youthful ones, to the deeper ones of adulthood, and the guilt left behind after some friendships end—are pivotal to the plot and elevate the story.

All the Dirty Secrets is great sophomore effort by Aggie Blum Thompson. I will have no hesitation when she releases her next novel. Recommended.