“A Guilty Secret” by Philippa East
With her latest novel, Philippa East has cemented herself as a master of the domestic, character-driven thriller. With a plot that keeps the reader guessing, A Guilty Secret is another wonderful exploration of what happens when our traumas catch up with us.
2003: Carrie and her friends spend their days studying at boarding school, and their nights sneaking out to the woods. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.
2019: When Finn receives a shocking call from his estranged wife, Mhairi, informing him of their friend Kate’s death, neither is prepared for the secrets they will uncover. The trail leads them to the events at a boarding school many years before.
They are on the verge of unearthing the whole story – but someone will do anything to keep it buried.
Full disclosure, I personally know Philippa East
I love a well-handled multiple-timeline story, and A Guilty Secret weaves a full story with scenes cutting back and forth between the present and the past. (Although I have to admit to having unhappy feelings about 2003 being considered "the past".)
When divorced couple Finn and Mhairi learn their friend Kate, a therapist, has committed suicide with apparently no warning, they refuse to accept there could be no reason and begin digging into the one clue they have; Carrie, a new client of Kate's with whom he had only one session. As they dig deeper, they begin to uncover a mystery that has been hidden for sixteen years.
I always enjoy East's stories. But as I've mentioned in my reviews of her previous books, that doesn't mean pure realism. When you pull apart the plot with a fine-toothed comb, it doesn't perfectly add up. You start to wonder why characters act in a certain way or how they are precisely where they need to be when the plot requires it.
But that's not why I always come back to East's writing. Her strength is her ability to craft a situation where the way the characters react and begin to unravel. We don't so much care about the characters themselves but about how they react to what's happening around them. That's where East, with her background in psychology, shines. I've not read many writers who have her skill in showing us how much of our lives are carefully constructed to ignore all the parts we don't want to acknowledge simply by throwing in a single event that sends everything crashing down around us.
I think this is refreshing. There are all too many thrillers out there where the plot is tight but ruined by uninteresting characters that are little more than props. I much prefer a story where the plot serves the character development.
Content warnings: suicide, suicidal intent, drug use, mental health
