Our Little Secret by Lisa Jackson

Hello beautiful people! Welcome back to a new review! For this review, I got into a book I received early access to from NetGalley a few days before its release. Our Little Secret by Lisa Jackson is a twisty mystery thriller that follows a family full of secrets, and a person who will stop at nothing to get access to one of its members. Our Little Secret is out now for everyone to read.

Main Characters:

• Brooke: Still in the early stages of repairing her marriage Brooke decides it’s time to call off the affair she is having with a young man named Gideon, what Brooke does not expect though is that Gideon is unwilling to let her go, after ending things Brooke starts to notice some weird things in her home and that someone is following her, the question becomes if Gideon is staying true to his word or if she is paranoid from all the secrets she is hiding from her family
• Neal: Brooke’s husband is a successful career man but it’s also through his career that he got caught up in an affair that almost ended his marriage, after being allowed to move back into his family home is trying anything possible to keep Brooke happy even if that means overstepping some boundaries
• Gideon: Brooke’s side piece who she continued things with even after she got back with her husband, Gideon is heartbroken when she ends things with him out of the blue and vows that he will never let her go, the question becomes how far he will go to try to win over the woman he loves
• Marilee: Brooke’s daughter who at 15 is going through some major attitude issues, is very frustrated with her parents (probably from their relationship issues) and doesn’t hold back from letting them know
• Leah: Brooke’s sister who comes to stay with the family while Brooke is at the peak of trying to figure out if Gideon is stalking her, adds more stress onto Brooke’s plate as she tends to only show up when she needs money

My Review

As mentioned before I received early access to Our Little Secret through NetGalley, but this does not affect the honesty I share on my reviews.

I’ve checked out a few of Lisa Jackson’s other books in the past and was excited when I saw that I was going to get to check out Our Little Secret. Lisa is a well-versed author in the mystery/thriller genre and I’ve enjoyed most of the books of hers I have checked out in the past. Our Little Secret fits into her classic style and is a suspenseful spine-tingling mystery thriller.

Our Little Secret follows Brooke and her family. After her marriage to her husband Neal almost ended the two decided to try again, meaning that Brooke would need to end her fling with the sexy Gideon who she met when the two were separated. Gideon helps Brooke get her groove back, and in the process of their sleeping together clearly becomes more attached to Brooke than she is to him. Letting the affair go on for too long after she and Neal decide to fix things Brooke decides to finally end it. What she doesn’t expect though is that Gideon will be so unwilling to let her go. Vowing that they will be together and she will be his the two end their relationship in a toxic way. Brooke doesn’t expect that Gideon will follow through on his word but when she notices things being moved in her home and feels that someone is watching the home and following her it seems like he may have stuck true to what he said. Throughout the book, as things progress Brooke struggles to piece together if her nerves from hiding this secret from her family are getting the best of her and making her paranoid or if it really is Gideon trying to find a way back into her life. Coupled with issues from her teenage daughter and her deadbeat sister looking for money Brooke struggles to know if what is going on in her head is the truth or not.

I gave Our Little Secret a 7/10 rating. Originally going into the blurb for the book it sounded interesting but I also thought it may be a bit predictable. I mean the scorned lover plot has been done many times before so I just wasn’t sure what would go on in this book that would make it different. I think the biggest factor that I felt made it a different book for me was the unreliable narrator in Brooke. Don’t get me wrong she’s a great main character for the book, but she’s unreliable in the sense that she barely even trusts what she is thinking and seeing, so how are we the reader supposed to? There was also this aspect of Brooke in which I felt like she often forgot that she was the one who invited the relationship into her life with a man she barely knew and was proactively working to hide it from everyone. Don’t get me wrong the ways she was being stalked and treated no one deserves, but she also invited him in and kept him around way longer than she should have. Due to all of this, she refuses to tell anyone else what is going on, or what she thinks is going on, which just puts her into this spot where she just drives herself crazier and crazier.

An aspect that was a bit of a downfall for me in the book was that I found when it came to some of the twists they were a bit predictable. There was a thought I had halfway through the book about where something was going to go, thought I was wrong about it but ultimately was right at the end, so not all of them were predictable. When it comes to the ones that were I will say that the predictability didn’t take away from my want to keep going and see how the book progresses. I know sometimes it can be a bummer but I felt like for Our Little Secret at least you couldn’t always be 100% sure you were right so you want to keep reading to find out. I also realized though that I always try to guess how a mystery and a thrill is going to play out in a book, and not everyone does that, so this may be a very much my issue. One other thing about the book that wasn’t super enjoyable is that all of the characters kind of suck. I don’t mean that in a way in terms of how they were written, but they are all just kind of terrible people. There, in my opinion, isn’t really anyone to root for in this book. All of the characters are moody, mean, and just downright terrible in the different things they do and say to one another. Brooke’s teenage daughter pissed me off. She is just so blatantly rude and disrespectful and Brooke is just like ‘you need to change your attitude’. Babe, she’s a demon, that isn’t going to fix it. Brooke picks her up a little bit late and this girl just tears her mom to shreds! I am not going to sit here and act like I was an angel of a teenager, but I definitely was not this bad. I am also not going to sit here and act like Brooke was a perfect lady, but in terms of her daughter, she was just doing her best and in my opinion, was not a terrible mom or anything. Brooke however though is very full of herself and tends to get wrapped up in her own world of issues forgetting about the others around her so maybe that plays a role, who knows.

Our Little Secret is filled with spine-tingling suspense which was a really enjoyable aspect of the book for me. I was constantly just tense during different parts waiting for things to explode in the characters’ faces and cringing when they continued to make terrible decisions throughout. While as I said before the plot of the scorned lover turned into a stalker has been done in other books in the past I enjoyed reading it from this different context in which for a lot of the book we are unsure if it’s really Gideon doing all of this or if its Brookes guilty mind eating at her and playing tricks. I would definitely recommend checking this one out if you have enjoyed others of Lisa Jackson’s books in the past, or just enjoy a good mystery thriller based on explosive relationships. Focusing on issues of infidelity, mental health, and how far you would go to try and keep things from changing this is defiantly a great new summer read.

Have you read Our Little Secret by Lisa Jackson before or any of her other books? What did you think?

Thank you for checking out this review, I hope you enjoyed it! Feel free to follow me on my socials @baddiebookreviews to be kept up to date for when I release a new review!