DNF @40%. No, I couldn't finish this. It was painful to read. It bored me and there were so many unnecessary details in this book. I didn't like anything about this book. If I did finish it, I would probably have given it a 1 star rating. I did read a recap of the whole novel and I pretty much predicted the ending anyway. I wouldn't recommend it and I don't think I will read anything else by Laura Lippman anytime soon.

This was the first Laura Lippman book I've read. I'm told she is a great mystery writer but this book is not one of her best. It started out as a great mystery but I found it rather slow. I was hoping it was leading up to a great ending. I must admit part of it kept me guessing but the end result left me disappointed. It made me feel that parts of the book were not even needed..just added as "filler" pieces. This book was turned into a movie and that's part of the reason I wanted to read it.

Reading this felt sort of like getting a root canal. No, getting a root canal was easier. There were so many random details thrown in about irrelevant characters that I literally got a headache. And they weren't interesting details either, just minutia, like where they ate lunch, where they shopped, or what type of books the usually checked out at the library. And the details weren't related to the mystery either, just random. The mystery involves the murder of a baby by two twelve year old girl...

Another enjoyably twisty Lippman. Troublemaker Ronnie and goody-goody Alice, both 11, find an unattended infant. Several days later, Olivia Barnes is found dead, and both girls are sentenced to 7 years in juvenile detention. Soon after they are released at 18, a toddler goes missing, and Olivia's mother--still angry and watchful-- believes (because of a strong resemblance between the missing girl and her own 3-year-old) that the girls must be responsible. A second mystery runs beneath the search...

wo little girls are banished from a birthday party after one of them uses the "n" word. As they wander home, they come across a baby in a coach seemingly abandoned on a city street. They take the baby back to their own "secret place" and one of them kills the baby. Seven years later they are both 18 and released from juvenile detention. Not long after baby girls disappear and reappear all over the area - until one disappears and is not returned. This was probably the most chilling book by Lippma...

One summer day, two eleven-year-old girls are "kicked out" of a pool party because of something one of them did. "Good girl" Alice Manning and "bad girl" Ronnie Fuller start off for home, but along the way, they see an unattended baby carriage. Somehow they end up taking the carriage, to "save" the child, but something goes horribly wrong. A few days later, the baby is found dead. Both girls, as juveniles, are given seven years in detention facilities. Upon their eighteenth birthdays, they are r...

I am a huge fan of Laura Lippman, and I have loved the three books before this that I have read. This one was definitely the least favorite of the four. That said, it was still a very good mystery, just not quite as well written as I am used to from the eminent Ms. Lippman. A young child is taken by 2 11-year-old girls and then killed. The book jumps to seven years later, when a 2nd little girl, similar to the first is kidnapped. The 2 original kidnappers have just been released from juvenile ha...

Shocking and well put together would best describe Every Secret Thing. Once I started I could not put it down. When Alice and Ronnie were 11 years old, a baby was taken from a front porch and four days later that baby was found dead. Seven years have past and the girls are released from their juvenile facilities and are meant to get on with their lives, but not everyone wants that for them and not everything is quiet what it appears. Then another little girl is taken and the quick assumption is

I recently saw the film adaptation of this book, a wonderfully subtle socially aware crime film that suffers with a terrible postscript that nevertheless I rated as my favourite film of 2015 so far, without that movie I would never have dipped my toes in to the populist thriller waters that Laura Lippman's fiction resides in, in my mind at least. Whilst I respect her subtle way of writing a popular novel with a cast of characters that doesn't include one white male the subtlety ends there unlike...

Anyway, Laura Lippman, aside from writing the Tess Monaghan series, writes standalone crime novels. Good ones. More "novels about crime" than "crime novels," because they're not just straight police procedurals (not that there's anything wrong with that). They contain realistic, fully developed characters as well as incredibly well constructed plots. "Every Secret Thing" is about two girls who get out of juvie after spending seven years there for killing a baby when they were 11 -- what can they...

This was my first Laura Lippman book, and even though I only gave it a rating of 2 stars, I would still give another book a chance. This was just ok, though. Writing was good but I thought there was a lot of unnecessary information about some of the characters, which put me off a little.

As an audiobook this was very slow going but then the shocking reveals at the end made it worth the investment. There are some twisted people out there. Yes, this was fiction but you know there are unbalanced people out there who would do things like kill a child and then cover it up.

I was really in the mood for a mystery, and the synopsis of this one really appealed to me.This book is about two girls, Ronnie and Alice, who committed an unspeakable crime when they were 11 years old. Their actions resulted in the death of a toddler and they were both sentenced to time in juvie. Seven years have passed and they have been released from their respective juvenile detention centers at the start of the novel. A short time later, a 3-year-old girl goes missing.To say much more would...

A big disappointment for me. The beginning of the book promises an offbeat, unique, psychological mystery. We are told that two fifth-grade girls murder a baby. However, the promise, the tension, and the mystery slowly dissolve in a flood of lengthy and completely irrelevant characterizations of marginal characters. The book would be much better if it were cut by about 60% in volume. Out of the four main characters, Helen, Alice, and Ronnie are quite skillfully drawn and psychologically believab...

This is a hard book to read, but not because it isn't written superbly. The difficulty is that there isn't a pleasant character, deed, or thought from page one to the end. No joy. The complex story unfolds bit by bit, grudgingly revealed under Lippman's very capable control. I guess you have to decide, at the end when all is known, who you feel the most sorry for. But as soon as you start to feel bad for someone, you have second thoughts. Nobody deserves sympathy. At least nobody who's still ali...

“The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been.” ----Laura LippmanLaura Lippman, an American award-winning NY Times best-selling author, has penned an incredibly nail-biting as well as edgy thriller, Every Secret Thing , that was published in the year 2004 and that has won quite a lot of literary awards. The story revolves around two l

Laura Lippman is another author recommended to me after my recent Gillian Flynn binge. She has a weighty volume of work to choose from, but I was drawn to the description of Every Secret Thing for my first . 11 year olds Ronnie and Alice are neighborhood friends unexpectedly -- and perhaps unjustly -- banished from a classmate's birthday party at the community pool. In their short walk home, a shocking crime will change both girls' lives forever. The story picks up seven years later, when both R...

I was in the mood for a good mystery, but this book didn't do the trick. The last 50 or so pages were like "Oh, and I forgot to mention THIS" and "I left out this part." Sort of like listening to a friend tell a story and then patching on the details after it ended. Too bad, because Laura Lippman has written a lot of books, but after my first read, I don't think I'll pick up another one. Oh, I forgot to mention that I left out this one part...

Review contains spoilers.Oh this book...where to start. I do think Laura Lippman is a great writer, but there were things about this book that annoyed me. One was the whole Alice is fat thing. Okay, we get that she is overweight. Does it need to be mentioned almost every time she appears. "Oh, Alice is fat!" "There's fat Alice again." Even when she is thinking about herself, it was included more often than not how fat she is. The one time her weight is mentioned it was something like, "She looke...

I love how Lippman toys with your perceptions as the novel winds on - just when you think you've decided how you feel about a character, she feeds you another piece of information that forces you to reevaluate. That she can do this without the new events and circumstances seeming out of place or manipulative is a testament to her skill and talent. This one would make a great book club pick for the challenges Lippman makes to the reader.