Secret Strangers
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
Money may be the root of all evil… but in the respectable community of Clearville there is a greater evil abroad.
The first incident is a suicide: a young wife who cannot have children. The second is more bizarre—a God-fearing father butchers his family before turning a gun on himself. And then a well-respected accountant simply disappears. But dark secrets abound in this prosperous town, for behind the shuttered windows of the middle-class homes lies a network of depravity and vice.
While babysitting for her neighbors' child, seventeen-year old Heidi stumbles across photographs from illicit sex sessions. Instead of going to the police, Heidi and her boyfriend Gary decide to exploit the crime for avaricious purposes, unaware of the magnitude of the horror and tragedy that will result from their blackmail. As they become greedier, suspicion and fear—like poison—corrode the heart of Clearville, and violence and retribution inevitably follow.
Very soon, Heidi and Gary are trapped in a situation which is hurtling crazily out of control—the blackmailers are now the hunted, and family and old friends are no longer what they seem to be. Suddenly the people they grew up with, and knew all their lives, have become secret strangers…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This disappointing thriller opens well with a prologue describing in sharp, convincing detail two suicides in the New York suburb of Clearville, but they do not connect with the poorly paced main plot until the final pages, by which time the reader may have lost interest. Tessier ( Rapture ) devotes the early chapters to developing an unsavory heroine named Heidi Luckner, a disaffected 17-year-old whose main complaint about her father's mysterious disappearance seems to be that her mother has stopped cooking and cleaning properly. While babysitting for Jane and Richard Seaton, Heidi discovers kinky photos of the couple; although she supposedly likes Jane, Heidi decides to blackmail the Seatons to the tune of $275,000. After the desperate Richard kills his wife and baby daughter, then takes his own life, the plot bogs down again in repetitive details of Heidi's suburban teen existence until the too-neat final twist. Most of the evil here is generated by Heidi herself, who is almost too vicious and hardboiled to be credible. Hampered by this poor choice of a heroine, and a plot cluttered with expository rationalization, the novel never lives up to its initial promise. ( Apr. )
