#not a thriller

[book-reviews-by-an-idiot]

No One Needs to Know by Lindsay Cameron

271 pages

Dual POV

2.5 🌟

Spice level-🌶

***Contains spoilers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!***

As I first started this story I was expecting drama, murder, a who dunit mystery that kept me on my toes. I was underwhelmed and unimpressed on how it played out.

The story follows three mothers: Norah, Heather, and Poppy.

Heather is the classic mom who wanted better for her Daughter Violet than herself. She pushes her daughter hard to do good in school, get excellent over-the-top grades, and get into a high-level boarding school for high school. She works as an author and is one of the few parents at Violet's school that doesn't have millions. She wants her daughter to succeed but when a leaked picture on an anon Insta account gets seen by hundreds, she might go a little too far to protect her own.

Norah was your typical workaholic mom who was hardly home, hoping she isn't messing up her child by being gone all the time. She made millions so her family never had to worry about finances like she did as a kid, with her mom slowly succumbing to Parkinson's (which is only ever brought up once throughout the book). All she wanted was to keep Caroline on track and try not to notice how sketchy her husband, Bennett, had been lately. Her husband also owned a gym where he trained those on lacrosse teams called Reflex an important detail at the beginning of the book.

Poppy wasn't happy in her marriage. It was sexless and unloving, she was a trophy wife in her relationship, but she didn't mean to cheat. Or rather she definitely did. Norah had the right to be suspicious about her new husband Bennett. At first, it was just flirting, a quip here, a compliment about her lips there. Until she invited him into her and her husband's bed. The prenup she had signed with her husband flashed before her eyes. She had screwed up, Bad.

She also had a housekeeper that I will call M. She was incredibly good-looking and one of the only ones to see Bennett come into the apartment for the cheating event. And always seemed to be in the wrong room at the wrong time.

Not long into the story, the readers find out about an app called UrbanMyth and The Doubles dance.

UrbanMyth is an anonymous app where you can go to post just about anything you can set your mind to. Cheating husbands, inflation at the grocery store, and accused drug dealers in a private middle school. Anyone can comment, but the catch? It only takes a small group of hackers to send it tumbling down(I will come back to this in a second)

The Doubles dance is basically if someone locked 100 or so celebrities in a room without their phones. The kids were all filthy rich and didn't realize their actions had consequences. All three kids end up at this dance: Poppy's son Henry, Heather's daughter Violet, and Norah's daughter Caroline. Henry is covered in phone numbers written in pen by the girls at the dance, a weird tradition that they have there.

As Heather drops off her child, waiting back just to make sure, a child, a girl, sneaks around the guard not giving him her phone, and runs into the dance. This is where the drama starts, with this well-written line by Heather that makes it sound like her daughter died but was actually just caught vaping. (Henry is in the picture as well, or rather his arm reaching out to take the vape from Violet)

"Rules were rules. If she hadn't left. If She'd somehow intervened. If. If. If."

As I said previously, Violet was caught in a picture, vaping, and was posted to an anon Instagram account, to which Heather freaks out and blames Norah's daughter Caroline. Eventually going as far as to search through Caroline's phone for the picture which leads me to my next subject.

Bennett, lovingly referred to as stepdad by caroline, bastard by Poppy, and countless other names by me as the book continues on. Bennett has a business of sleeping with wealthy women and getting them on tape if you catch my drift, forcing them to give up a ransom for deletion of the video(but let's be honest he probably doesn't delete them.) As he and Poppy are laying in the bed she sees his phone recording and screams at him to leave. A lot of stuff goes down but in small words, he demands money in a week and she freaks out thinking her husband is going to divorce her and take everything because of the prenup. She does end up transferring him the money, but wasn't able to meet up with him so she doesn't know if he deleted the video.

Caroline finds out about Poppy and Bennett very early on, catching a picture of them on her phone, making out in the backseat of her car. Norah later finds this picture, as does Heather as said above, and kicks him out of the house, with him telling her she will regret what he had done.

As I said before, Urbanmyth is very popular amongst the Crfton middle school parents. Except, well it gets hacked. Everyone's secrets are out. A lot of stuff happens during this time but it's not big enough to be remembered by me. Except Heather doing something incredibly stupid after finding the picture. Posting on the app about how she was sleeping with the coach at Reflex, trying to out Poppy to the world. But instead getting heavily questioned by the police.

Norah gets a call from Bennett's mom about not being at her birthday party and this is when the story gets juicy. You see he had never missed a party of his dear mother's. Like ever. A few days later he's missing. Oh no not Bennett.

Skipping a few parts we are in the living room of Poppy's apartment. Heather, Poppy, M, and the doorman stand there. A secret is let out, Bennett wasn't just missing, he was murdered. By M. Which she annoyingly, and willingly admits. The day Poppy was supposed to meet him in the apartment, Bennett went after M, touched her in a place she didn't like while she was cleaning, and tried to rape her. She pushed him off, she was on a ladder, and he hit his head and died on impact(or possibly broke his neck I can't remember exactly. Maybe both.) Fernando, the doorman, hid the body because M and he are dating.

He is found a day before this interaction, in the water underneath a bridge. The police suspect no foul play, and when they arrive at Norah's apartment tell her that he most likely committed suicide by jumping off the bridge. Poppy and the others find this in the news headlines and accept this as their new normal.

The book ends with M in a bank, holding a 100k check in her hands and depositing it into her account. Poppy had given it to her for her silence, and because she was laying her off. And then she is free.

All in all the book by itself is a decent and quick read. But don't trust the tags that read 'thriller', 'fast-paced', or 'murder mystery' because it's just not that. On page 240ish, the murder is first brought up. I rated this book this way because I was severely disappointed, and led to believe it was something it was not. There is no mystery ad the one who murdered Bennet was jut out right said and there was no detectiveness that you could do to try and figure it out. I wished that it was in third person because the three person dual POV was a little hard to follow at first, and wished the book was much longer. I also would have loved to learn more about Poppy's son Henry because it seemed he was just there to connect her to Crofton. And honestly I think the kids' POV's would have been a cool way to do this as well. If you want a quick read I recommend it, but if you want a thriller? Somewhere else is your best bet.

[witchlinda]

Taisiia Onofriichuk from Ukraine performs her hoop routine to the sound of "Thriller" by Michael Jackson at the 2024 Paris Olympics Rhythmic Gymnastics Individual Qualifiers

[plang-works]

my little spin on the iconic delicious in dungeon comic, but with my favorite scene from thriller bark

[bumbleboa]

I love the coward trio

[ellierenae]

write unpublishable things. it's good for you.

[dailyflicks]

Knives Out 2019 | dir. Rian Johnson

[waltj]

*please rb w reasons or elaboration! i'm curious

[bridgekc]

here’s koby as a (much less creepy) zenitsu, and some other designs i’ve been brainstorming

[guillotineman]

On the set of Alien: Romulus (2024)

[mintaii]

halloween island

[cottoncandyofterror]

Thriller Bark but OPLA and a wee bit more homoerotic touching!

[sequinedrhinestones]

MICHAEL JACKSON // (05/∞) Thriller 40: The Album That Changed It All

[vongulli]

Some doodles over the past bit!!!

[filmgifs]

Some of the cameos in GLASS ONION (2022)

[becomingvecna]

[sibmakesart]

eyebrow reveal (the light hearted-interlude)

start || prev

(edit : put the earings back lol i think i forgot them on the prev ones too lmao)