It was a fun read who done it, that you knew the dead person when it started. So many people hated her. You could guess which one did it

A quick read about competitive Moms in a small Irish village. You’ll find busy families, cheating, doubts and Instagram all wrapped up in one book! Thank you NG for the ARC

Ciara Dunphy, vlogger and influencer, has it all. A wealthy, handsome husband, two beautiful children, the biggest house in the village, the tightest circle of friends, a carefully curated wardrobe…everything. She’s also dead. We know this from the beginning of Dirty Laundry, a juicy desperate housewives on steroids domestic thriller. We won’t know who killed her until the final chapter but there are many suspects. There’s her unappreciated husband who she married for money, her “best friend” Mishti who has started to see the real Ciara, her next door neighbor Lauren, the target of her bullying and many more. Jilted lovers, plots worthy of high school mean girls, addictions, deceptions, love, despair…the Dirty Laundry piles up.

There are no even slightly likable characters in this delicious, fun to read mystery. It doesn’t matter! I especially liked learning about the childhoods of Ciara, Mishti and Lauren and how they were shaped by them. It makes their actions more complex and understandable. 5 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley, Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine and Disha Bose for this ARC.

Ciara Dunphy has moved to the neighborhood with her two children and husband. Ciara is also very outgoing and beautiful. Ciara's childhood was turned on its ear after her father left and her mother closed herself off in her bedroom. Ciara has a hole that she is constantly trying to feed to boost her ego.

Mishti Guha chose the path she knew would make her parents proud by allowing them to pick her husband. She knew others envied her when Dr. Parth Guha chose her and whisked her away from Calcutta to Ireland. She has a young daughter, Maya, who is best friends with Ciara's daughter, Bella. Mishti feels grateful that she was welcomed under Ciara's wing.

Lauren Doyle has lived her entire life in the village. She grew up feeling displaced in her own family so she would stay with her gran. Despite all her attempts to make friends, the other girls would look down their noses at her. When her gran passed, she left Lauren an inheritance, including her house. Lauren lives there with her three children and partner.

My perception of the three women changed as I read about each one. Reading the background of each gave a picture of what made them tick. I got why Mishti wanted to be accepted by the women and wouldn't be friendly to Lauren for fear of being shunned, however, by not stepping up and saying something Mishti was also participating in the ostracizing of Lauren. I felt the most for Lauren, who seemed to lack love growing up with a family who thought they were saddled with a daughter they didn't want. As a result of feeling like an outsider, Lauren didn't know how to socialize where others saw her as odd. That lasted into her adulthood. While Lauren seemed good at reading Ciara's motives and giving Mishti advice, I was angry at Lauren for overlooking her own situation and not being stronger. Ciara's situation growing up left her with an insatiable need for attention. She had no problem vilifying others using social media. Ciara isn't who her friends think she is.

Ciara's murder brings to light everyone's dirty laundry!

I received an ARC from NetGalley via Random House Publishing Group--Ballantine and I have voluntarily reviewed this book.

Cheating, arranged marriages, bullies, mean girls, revenge, spying, possible murder. What more can someone want in the book they’re reading? Set in a small Irish town we have old friends, new friends, old enemies, new enemies. And it pretty much takes just one to get the ball rolling. I literally didn’t want to put this book down. And I sure as heck couldn’t survive under these conditions!

The novel begins with a dead body. The rest of the book details the many people who won’t be sorry Ciara is gone.

Ciara seems to have it all, and she details it on her social media accounts that are generating revenue. Most of the other women in the small Irish village choose to listen to her, which leads to ugly mean-girl behavior.

Mishti is Ciara’s best friend, but she’s in an unhappily arranged marriage and misses the warmth of her native India. Lauren loves motherhood in all its disheveled glory, but her freethinking ways make her a weirdo in her village, particularly since she inadvertently got on Ciara’s wrong side when they first met.

I thought the characters of Mishti and Lauren were interesting. Ciara is pretty despicable. These women either don’t do a good job of standing up for themselves or, in the other direction, not caring about other people at all. This is fun, but I didn’t love it.

NetGalley provided an advance copy of this novel, which RELEASES MARCH 24, 2023.

Dirty Laundry reads like a desperate housewives murder mystery. The author does a good job of keeping the reader guessing until the very end. The character of Ciara is hard to like and doesn’t have many redeeming qualities. Mostly the books makes the reader sad for Lauren and Mishti and the wedge that Ciara’s presence puts between the very type of friendship the aforementioned women need. The husbands while all vastly different were similar in that they were not what their wives needed. The book was a good and interesting read.

When I started this book I thought murder would be the forefront to this story, but that seemed to be more of a background thought. I like the small town, small neighborhood, domestic drama angle of this book. Told from three POV's from each woman Lauren, Mishti, and Ciara. These women in their own ways all definitely had "dirty laundry" that needed to be rectified. I have to say this is the first book I can think of off the top of my head that I really despised a lot of the characters. Ciara I found that even though it was explained why she acted how she did I still found so annoying because she still chose to be that way and was all around not a good person. Mishti I felt sadness for with her arranged marriage to her Parth, and I despised his character he wasn't a nice or kind person either. Lauren and her boyfriend Sean I probably liked them the least. Sean was such a loser as a partner and so selfish, and Lauren annoyingly just accepted Sean's faults over and over until she got mad about what she already accepted with his infidelity and selfishness. Ciara's husband Gerry wasn't a big part of the storyline but I do like how he was incorporated at the end. This book delved intricately into the lives of these women and their significant others and how it all led to one who ended up dead! This book was different for me, not a thriller, slightly a mystery, some suspense, no real romance that made me swoon, but there was a lot of drama and it wasn't boring so it made me want to see how it unfolded. For a debut, I would say it is intriguing and I am interested in reading what Bose will come up with next! Thank you NetGalley for the ARC to read and review.

I really wanted to like this book. It’s well written, the setting is interesting, I probably could have even gotten comfortable with the premise. But there is not one single likeable character in this entire novel. So hard to watch them do terrible things to each other, without anything redeeming in the back story. Some deeper exploration of online bullying in moms circles might have helped. Unfortunately not a hit for me.

I think my rating for this book hovers around 2.5-3 stars, but I’m rounding up to 3 because I did find this book to be very readable.

That said, just about everything in this book is fine, but not great. The plot is fine, the story is fine, the characters are fine. But the book as a whole just misses its mark. Much of the book feels like it was just included to add to the page count without really doing anything for the story. The dialogue is also a big problem for me. A lot of the dialogue feels forced and stilted. At times it reads as natural, but for the most part I found myself being torn out of the story due to the unnatural dialogue between the characters, particularly the women.

Also, none of the characters are particularly likeable, which I know was intentional; however, not having at least one character to really root for made it difficult for me to want to see the book through to the end.

As for the ending, it felt very abrupt. The book builds up to Ciara’s murder and then suddenly ends without much closure. I think and Epilogue would have been a nice way to wrap things up for the reader.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Three women live in Ireland with their husbands (even though one is not married, they would be considered common law in the US). Ciara has the perfect life, great house, rich husband and perfect children. Or is it so perfect?

I liked the back stories of the women and felt sorry for Lauren and Mishti. Ciara had it all, or at least that's how everyone perceived her life. She has many followers on her social media platform and everyone envies her but she just isn't a nice person.

The author does a great job of keeping you interested in the story.

I personally love reading about terrible women and mothers, which made me love this book.

The Prem and Mishti dynamic is so GD real, I felt it in my bones. Which is why while the ending to Mishti's storyline was gruesome ala "In My Dreams I Hold A Knife," I am excited for her future.

I have many thoughts on how Lauren ended up. Framed positively, but I felt its tragedy.

Ending was abrupt but still tied all the loose strings.

Looking forward to more Bose in the future!

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC.

The premise of this book piqued my interest — a story of three families living in County Cork, Ireland. These couples have a tenuous relationship at best. The proverbial shite hits the fan when they learn that one of them is manipulating all of them. I enjoyed this book, but I don’t think it quite hit the mark with what it was trying to achieve. It will be interesting to find out what other people think once it is released. Stories like this always spark lively discussion.

Genre: Domestic Suspense/Murder Mystery
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine Books
Pub. Date: April 4, 2023

Mini-Review

I was in the mood for a beach read when I decided to review this novel. And fluff is just what I got. The story revolves around a trio of competitive mothers in the present time who reside in an Irish village. One can anticipate that in this genre, one of them will be murdered. The three of them alternately narrate the story from their points of view. We meet the so-called perfect mom, the community's passive-aggressive ruler. She adopts the immigrant newcomer mom, and they become best buddies. The third mom is shunned by the other two because the ruler does not want her in the trio for petty reasons. Think “Mean Girls.” I enjoyed this novel but only recommend it if you go in knowing that you will be reading yet another dysfunctional neighborhood murder tale often written better in previous books.

I kept waiting and waiting for this book to get good. Read through it pretty fast because I was hoping that something interesting was going to happen. Very underwhelming. Thanks NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

What a fun, messy read - Dirty Laundry is a bit tawdry, twisted and below board. Readers will love to hate Ciara and her group of mean girls who taunt Lauren online while protecting Mishti.

Told from three women's point of view, why does Ciara despise Lauren so much? And why is she so nice to Mishti? Life in small Irish village is about to get tumultuous when Ciara's secrets are revealed for all to see one by one. Lauren wants only to have a stable family; Mishti wants love and acceptance in her new country and Ciara wants to be the queen of them all.

Very good and fun read, readers will be on the edge of their seats when the Dirty Laundry finally comes out in the wash.

This book kept me guessing throughout and the ending had me quite surprised. It was a little difficult for me to get into to begin with, but once I got into it, I was hooked. I love this type of whodunnit where I don't even figure it out until it's obvious. All in all, great read.

I have a love/hate relationship with unlikeable characters. I don’t have to like them, but I do have to find them interesting. There has to be some nuance to their personalities, something that makes them three dimensional. Dirty Laundry could win a prize for the most unlikeable characters. Ciara is supposedly the perfect mother according to her Instagram account. But she was a b**ch, plain and simple. The things she thinks are acceptable behavior! My eyes were rolling. Her friend, Mishti was in an arranged marriage with an absentee husband. He treats her like she’s the hired help. Lauren is the outcast. It’s a small town and she’s never been accepted. Her partner, Sean, is unemployed, undependable and unfaithful, but she’s ok with that. She is living proof love can be blind. These three female characters weren’t nuanced, if anything, they were pretty flat. But I was curious to see if Mishti and Lauren would grow backbones and become independent.
The story goes back and forth in time and switches between the three women. The reader is told early on about a murder but this can’t really be considered a murder mystery.
This was entertaining, an easy read. It doesn’t really cover any new ground but I truly wanted to see how it would play out. I thought the ending worked well.
My thanks to Netgalley and Random House- Balllantine Books for an advance copy.

Wasn’t a huge fan of this book. I think it had great potential but fell flat. I thought the book was fluffed up a bunch of pointless information at times. For me it did start off strong but then kind of fizzled out.

Dirty Laundry tells the story of a group of women in a small Irish village and the many secrets they hide. Ciara, the "leader" of the group appears to have it all, at least until she ends up murdered. The book does a great job of doling out the secrets and keeping you glued to the page; there were twists and turns until the very end!

I didn't totally enjoy this book because none of the characters were really very likable; I always want to have someone to root for, and that just wasn't the case here. But overall, it was a compelling read, and I'm interested to see what this debut author does next. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!