I was rooting for her as she tried to unravel the truth about her mother’s past and the dead man. I wanted to give Lauren a hug when she witnesses her mother stab a strange man to death. Morton does a great job of bringing everyone to vivid life. The characterisation in The Secret Keeper is excellent.

It gives the game away a little but I can live with that. When all the dots finally connected about two chapters from the end Morton blew me away. The narrative weaves effortlessly back and forth in time from 2011 to the 40’s and a few chapters that deal with the past of Vivien, an old friend of Lauren’s mother are set in the 20’s. Morton does a great job of building a web of intrigue and mystery. It’s something in the way the vegetable patch has been laid out, just so, at the back of the house the proud gleam of the leadlight windows the careful patching of the roofing tiles. The chimney pots are steaming and you know, just by looking, that there’s something tasty simmering on the stove top beneath. The house is unassuming, with white paint peeling gently on the Western side and clematis scrambling up the plaster. Rural England, a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, a summer’s day at the start of the nineteen sixties. A tale of three strangers from vastly different worlds–Dorothy, Vivien and Jimmy–who are brought together by chance in wartime London and whose lives become fiercely and fatally entwined…

Haunted by memories, and the mystery of what she saw that day, she returns to her family home and begins to piece together a secret history. But before the idyllic afternoon is over, Laurel will have witnessed a shocking crime that changes everything.Ģ011: Now a much-loved actress, Laurel finds herself overwhelmed by shades of the past. I couldn’t resist The Secret Keeper when I saw it on the shelves at the library.ġ961: On a sweltering summer’s day, while her family picnics by the stream on their Suffolk farm, sixteen-year-old Laurel hides out in her childhood tree house dreaming of a boy called Billy, a move to London, and the bright future she can’t wait to seize. I’ve wanted to read more of her work since then. I read Morton’s debut novel, The House at Riverton over a year ago.

Keeper kim chance