Dirty Little Secret, bestselling writer Jo Spain's new standalone psychological thriller, is hardly an original concept; after all, it's based on the secrets of a small, affluent gated community in and around the area of Wicklow, Ireland. When elderly Olive Collins's decomposing body is found the police are at a loss as to who would want her dead; a lonely, innocent old lady causing no harm to anyone or was she? Things are not as they seem, and the police soon realise Olive was rather spiky and revelled in being a troublemaker. As the secrets begin to unravel it appears that just about everyone living in the development had a motive to kill Olive.

Police have their work cut out, not for the usual reason of too few suspects, but the exact opposite; there are too many here. As with Spain's other books the writing just flows beautifully and getting into the story is so, so easy. Once you're in, those pages just keep a turning more and more frenetically to find out who the perpetrator is. The fast pace, well drawn and interesting characters and how intensely gripping and absorbing the plot was made this a thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining read. This is a suspenseful, tense and refreshing take on well-used tropes of the genre.

Many thanks to Quercus for an ARC.

This book was brilliant, twists and surprises....lots of buried secrets that are going to come out!! I love a book where I have no clue what's going ro happen and this did that for me....there is dark humour and some emotional bits, everything that I would imagine living in a community like this would be. I wasn't overly fond of any of the characters, but that only added to the mystery. A well written thriller, ahort chapters make it easy to say "just one more" and I was hooked from the start!! Absolutely well worth picking up and I'm looking forward to more from Jo

Dirty Little Secrets is an excellent example of how to write a psychological thriller. I remember being totally gripped by Jo Spain’s previous novel The Confession last year, so I jumped at the chance to read her second and I dived into it straight away, and Jo Spain has delivered another corker of a read. Told from the perspectives of residents within a tight-knit community it makes for an utterly compulsive read that I could not put down.

The gated community known as Withered Vale is a collection of exclusive properties for the very wealthy. At the beginning of the book, one of the residents, Olive Collins, is found dead, but here’s the thing, her body was left rotting away in her house for three months before it was discovered. How could anyone not have checked on her in all that time, or realised that something was wrong? Already I could feel the tension as I wondered which of the neighbours knew something about Olive’s death and if any of them had played a part in it.

This book really will make you examine your own neighbours just that little more closely. Within such a small, tight-knit space there are some very different characters, who all have their own sets of problems. And it becomes very clear that none of them were particularly keen on Olive. So was one of them responsible for her death?

Jo Spain gets to know the psychology of her character’s really well, as I was reading I had suspicions of just about all of them. We also get to hear from Olive’s perspective, I found this unusual at first, because at this point, she is already dead, but as I got into the story, I thought it worked really well. We often don’t get to hear from the perspectives of victim’s in crime novels, so this is what made Dirty Little Secrets a really interesting read. I’m sure Olive is a character who will provoke strong opinions among readers.

This is an excellent, character-driven novel that I am a big, big fan of. Jo Spain has leapt onto my list of must-read authors. She creates a real sense that everyone in this book is hiding something and I just had to know what the truth was.

# Dirty Little Secrets #Netgalley
All the joys of living in a gated community, when everyone wants you dead for one reason or the other. I think I will give it a miss living in a gated community. It’s Quite enthralling read to be honest. It apears what they didn’t know Olivia Collins has been lying dead for 4 days. With no one bothering to check on her. Some think with there big posh house she doesn’t belong iin there community, because of the small size of her house. Yet what they seem to forget she lived there first in her little 2 bed cottage way before the big houses where built. A few if not all think her little house lowers the tone of the community. Which all said and done, with her having lived in her cottage almost in the middle of nowhere with no houses around her for many years. Olive feel they have imposed on her surroundings. And also she should be in charge. With them all wanting her dead makes for a chilling read, from the start to the finish. It’s rather sad she’s been there 4 days without a single person checking on her welfare. The rest of the community just want her gone. It’s genuinely a chilling read highly recommend you read this novel. Gripping

It had been a while since I had last read a dark and gripping psychological thriller before I stumbled upon this book on Netgalley. The synopsis had me intrigued and I was hooked right from the first chapter. The characters were delightfully complex yet the plot seemed so simple that I was expecting the typical psychological thriller with drastic and somewhat far-fetched revelations of the characters' lives. I was pleasantly surprised that the plot developed in unexpected ways, luring us to believe that Olive had nothing to hide yet swiftly transforming into a much more complicated story.

Completely unaware of each other's struggles, the neighbours at Withered Vale are shocked to find out about Olive's death but do not appear too troubled when the police focus their search for the perpetrator inside the community. Each chapter focuses on the owners of each house and Olive's attitude towards them. I particularly enjoyed the back and forth game of figuring out if Olive was within reason to dislike her neighbours based on certain attributes they presented, or if they really did have a solid argument to keep away from her while she was alive. It was captivating and I was constantly wanting to learn more about the background of all the characters, desperate to find out who killed Olive.

The final few chapters were especially interesting as more hints were revealed that seriously made me doubt their intentions towards Olive. Unfortunately the final chapter where we understand what happened to Olive hours before her death was slightly disappointing and I felt that after so much speculation the reveal would be more explosive. Nevertheless, it did not distract from the brilliant story line and the intricate puzzle that the author created. I highly recommend this book to all lovers of dark psychological thrillers.

What a good book! It's enthralling and entertaining, once you start you cannot put it down.
I read a lot of very good review of this book and was curious.
Once I started I was hooked and I can say that Ms Spain is a master storyteller.
The cast of characters was fascinating, they're well written and fleshed out. They're not likable and each of them has secrets that will be revealed during the book.
I liked the couple of detectives, they were the most likable characters.
The inhabitants of the community sometimes seemed to be seen in a satirical way, each with their quirk and secrets.
The end was totally unexpected and it made me gasp and laugh at the same time.
I think there's a lot of humour and I liked it.
Even if this is a very modern book I thought there are some echo of the mysteries of the Golden Age and, being a fan of those mysteries, this is a compliment :)
A very good book, I look forward to reading other books by Ms Spain.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to Quercus Books and Netgalley for this ARC

If you are a fan of Liane Moriarty’s books, then you are really going to love the new gripping novel by Jo Spain. Set in an exclusive gated community where everyone is hiding something, DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS is a brilliant and twisty novel that I found really hard to put down. This is not a surprise for me because it happens every time I read one of her novels.

There are seven houses in Withered Vale: two families with children, a single mother with her teenage daughter, a retired couple, and two single men. And then there is Olive Collins. In her fifties, single, and retired, Olive has been dead in her house for three months before her neighbours noticed and they did notice only because of the bad smell coming from her house. Frank and Emma are the detectives who are trying to figure out if Olive’s death was an accident or a murder and, as they interview the community, they discover that everyone in Withered Vale wanted Olive gone.

The story is told from the points of views of all the characters in the novel, including Olive who tells her side of the story from the grave (which, by the way, reminded me a lot of Desperate Housewives). Jo Spain created a cast of well-crafted and diverse characters that fit perfectly in the story. Even though they live in close proximity, there is no sense of community between the residents of Withered Vale. They don’t like or trust each other. And I didn’t like some of them, while I cheered on some of the others (especially Alison Daly and her daughter Holly). I loved the characters of Frank and Emma, the detectives investigating Olive’s death. Frank is in his fifties, three months from retirement, and tired of all the bad things he sees in his job. On the other hand, Emma is young, enthusiastic, and eager to prove herself. Together they make an odd pair and their exchanges make an entertaining read.

I was fascinated by the setting of the novel. The community of Withered Vale should be safe with its gates and alarms, but it feels more like a prison and when one of them is found dead, the police doesn’t even think to investigate outside of the community.

DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS kept me completely hooked. I found the story masterfully plotted: with each chapter I read, a new suspect would come up, making it impossible to figure out the killer and I loved the ending which was brilliant and completely unexpected. Chilling, twisty, and captivating, DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS is definitely another must-read from Jo Spain.

*Many thanks to Jo Spain, Quercus Books and Netgalley for providing me with ARC in exchange for my honest review.*
My second book by Jo Spain turned out enjoyable. The idea of giving a voice to the victim alongside the other characters is quite intriguing. Yes, this is a murder story but also a story of secrets, some dirty, that are revealed in due course as in any good story. The atmospehere in a small community who live in a posh residential area is dense and gradually they learn a lot about themselves while confronted with the suspicious death of their neighbour.

‘Withered Vale’
Gated, Exclusive
6 Neighbours, Many Many Secrets
1 Neighbour Dead
For weeks
In Her Armchair
No One Knew
No One Cared
Disgraceful
Poor Olive Collins......she didn’t deserve that.....did she??

Dirty little secrets, and they abound, almost jumping from house to house and neighbour to neighbour in this wonderfully dark whodunit
‘Trust none of them’ is my advice, they all have reason to want Olive dead...she misses nothing and knows all, she knows way way too much....
Its soooo good I want to start it again as I am writing this!
The style of writing is easy to fall into as it smoothly takes you through each house and neighbour, who they are, who they REALLY are and what they were doing the day Olive died
The Characters are each just superb and you will like, dislike, trust, untrust and feel many more emotions for each one of them until the truth about each is known!!!
The story itself is fast and at times brutal and there is not a second of daydream time, its all happening constantly as you turn ( or flick ) each page ( or screen! )
Fabulous narrative from each neighbour inc Olive!!! and what really happened that day could go any of so many ways until you get to the last chapter and all is revealed and you dont know wether to laugh or cry be happy or sad, its a shocker!
The author has created a very cleverly put together awesome read and will be reading more of Jo Spain’s books
Wonderful read, I loved every sentence
10/10 5 Stars

I read The Confession by Jo Spain last year and thought it was a brilliant, sophisticated thriller. Dirty Little Secrets has been high on my anticipated read list for 2019 and I was not disappointed. Set in a small gated community outside Dublin, Dirty Little Secrets is a tightly plotted book containing characters we can’t quite trust, a death and two detectives who realise that something is amiss.

Withered Vale is an exclusive community which contains beautiful, extravagant homes lived in by wealthy and glamorous people. In the centre of this cul-de-sac is a small cottage owned by Olive Collins. Her cottage is incongruous amongst this wealth, she lived there alone before the developers built the Vale around her, and it is in this cottage that she dies one March evening. It is three months before her body is discovered badly decomposed in an armchair, but did she die of natural causes? And more importantly, why hadn’t her neighbours realised?

What I really like about Jo Spain’s books is the examination of human nature and in Dirty Little Secrets we have the full spectrum on show. Marriages in crises, a Lothario, a 30 something man with a porn addiction, a single mother living with her teenage daughter and a retired couple enjoying copious holidays, it is all right there in Withered Vale. Then there is Olive. Single, lonely and dare I say it a little desperate? Desperate for love and affection and desperate to fit in she tries to ingratiate herself with her neighbours. The thing is, she is a little annoying and the other inhabitants are less than enamoured with sharing their lives with her. But is she annoying enough to murder?

This book is chock full of, er, dirty little secrets which are slowly and tantalisingly revealed to us. It is a page turner of a book with hints of dark deeds just outside of reach and through a clever narrative structure the whole picture slowly comes into focus. It is through chapters which alternate between the inhabitants of Withered Vale, Detectives Frank Brazil and Emma Child and Olive herself that we discover the long held grudges, petty actions and devastating tragedies that occur behind closed doors.

I loved and adored DI Frank Brazil and his curmudgeonly persona. He and Emma are a great partnership and it was striking that as the fractures and the fissures in the Vale widened these two these two seemingly opposite characters are brought closer together. There are some lovely tender moments of friendship between these two which were heartwarming to read.

Dirty Little Secrets reminded me of a Liane Moriarty book with its mystery, suspense, secrets and a cast of characters with things to hide. I loved the slow unfurling of the plot and was blindsided on more than once occasion. It is a wonderfully written book and had me guessing right to the end.

My Review: Dirty Little Secrets is Jo Spain’s latest psychological thriller and as I loved her previous book The Confession I was very excited to start this one.

OMG I absolutely LOVED this book and devoured it in a day – I even woke up at 3.30am thinking about the book and finished it at 4.30am because I couldn’t wait to find out more.

In a secured, affluent gated community are 7 houses with seven neighbours all with HUGE secrets. When one of the neighbours, Olive Collins is found dead inside her house, having been left to rot for 3 months, the police start to investigate how, why and when and more importantly realise that almost every neighbour had reason to want Olive dead.

I absolutely LOVED each character narrating their version of the truth and Olive telling us her side of the story from beyond the grave was utter genuis. If you can imagine Desperate Housewives directed by Quentin Tarantino then you might get an inkling of how dark and deliciously disturbing Dirty Little Secrets is.

Fabulous characters, loved all their back stories, loved the relationship between the 2 police detectives, loved the pace, the humour, the style of writing, the amusing twists and turns along the way and I am pretty confident this is going into my Top Ten of 2019 – 100% recommended.

This is a really good read. There are so many secrets in this small gated community. Olive was nosey and tried to find out people's secrets and use that knowledge to her advantage. When she is found dead there are a number of suspects. This book is very well written and was a pleasure to read. I will definitely be looking out for more books by this author.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

would like to thank netgalley and the publisher for letting me read another amazing book by jo spain

a quiet little cul de sac
a small neighbourhood
one very dead body, its only when the mass of blue bottles escape that the neighbours think to go looking where olive is

olive, there is one in every town, city and street, in fact i think i live opposite one...so reading this i felt i was there, that this has happened to me, there were people that i could recognise as living in my street and as the story went on the more this book gripped me...couldnt put it down

who murdered olive in a gated community, things were afoot and not easy to understand as each neighbour had had a run in with olive...

a great book and i loved every so often you had a small chapter on olive...and her take on things...well written and captivating, each neighbour has a story to tell some are heartbreaking and some just plain normal but get a busybody like olive and it can turn any sane person...

keep an eye out for this one

I loved this book. Who knew one little community could hide so many suspicious and damaged relationships? I'm a big fan of Jo's Inspector Reynolds series but the recent stand alone novels are just as gripping.

Dirty Little Secrets is the perfect title for this thriller as it is as exactly that and full of them.
Olive Collins is dead in her house but she’s been dead virtually three months and considering she lives in a gated community of 7 houses you’d think one of the neighbours would have missed her but the further you go into this thriller the more you find out that Olive was a lonely woman who tried to be friendly but didn’t quite fit in.
This was a book I flew through I loved how we followed Frank and Emma through their investigations as the lead police investigators and how we saw the pair grow closer as the story went along. This thriller is set in the past for Olive’s chapters and present tense for the occupants of the other houses, this I felt worked well within the layout of the chapters.
A slow burner that kept me wanting to know more and I really enjoyed this whodunnit.
I would like to thank Netgalley and Quercus Books for this ARC I received in exchange for an honest review.

Olive is not a nice person. She thinks she is and she never gets why people keep becoming irritated with her. But soon we will get to know Olive and we will understand.

Withered Vale is a small gated community. Each person who lives there has a secret. And Olive has the talent to find out what the secret is. So when she seems to have disappeared for 3 months everybody is secretly happy about it. But it turns out that Olive has not disappeared. She is still in her house, dead and a feast for the bugs. The police find out that it was not a natural dead. So who of the neighbors wanted Olive to be dead?

This book is more of a slow burner but it does not fail to entertain. At first I had problems to keep all those people apart but after a while they became real characters and I knew who was who. There are multiple POV including dead Olive who tells us what she found out about the pasts of her neighbors. Not all of the secrets are scandalous; some of them are a bit underwhelming. But it still was a decent whodunit. It is an easy read and it keeps you guessing until the end.

Excellent murder mystery! A murder in a gated community with a limited pool of suspects made for a really good story. My first book by this author and will be looking for more!

A quiet gated community becomes the centre of a murder investigation as one of the residents is found dead. Any of the other residents could have been guilty, but who was it? Each of them has a motive and each could have killed the single lady.
Not read any of Jo’s books before, but a great read that will have you captivated from beginning to end.

“I was doing okay, sitting there on the chair, silently decomposing.”

The fact that part of this story was apparently being narrated by the late Olive Collins from beyond the grave was an early clue that as crime novels go, this one might be a bit different. It definitely had a faintly tongue in cheek flavour at times, particularly near the beginning, and I was reminded a bit of Laura Wilson’s The Other Woman, which had a similar feel (and a decomposing body). This impression wore off after a while, though.

How could Olive lie, or rather sit, undiscovered for so long in a very small community (seven houses) where the inhabitants all know each other? It seems all her neighbours have secrets to hide, and there’s plenty for veteran detective Frank Brazil and his younger colleague, Emma Child, to unravel. I suppose if you choose to live in a place with a name like Withered Vale, it’s not going to end well.

There are certainly classic mystery elements - a probable murder, a limited pool of suspects (the residents of the gated community), all of whom have something to hide, all with a possible motive. While at first sight many seem like stereotypes (ladies’ man Ron, earth mother Lily), they all have hidden depths. The end was both surprising and satisfying.

Another excellent read from Jo Spain, with a rather different flavour to it than most.

Withered Vale is a gated housing community. One resident Olive Collins has lived there the longest. Now she has been found dead in her house. Not only that she has been dead for three months and non of her neighbours seemed to notice.

I really enjoyed this book and found it fun to read. Six neighbours with six secrets. Each of the residents had a run in with Olive, and all of them potentially could have killed her.

At first I had to keep up with who was who, who was married to who and which house they lived in. However I soon got into the story. Each chapter was told from the view of the neighbours and how they were connected to Olive, also the two detectives investigating the death. As each character's story unfolds then all the secrets begin to unfold.

This story was very intriguing and as it progressed it became for me a game of Cluedo. Which resident hated Olive enough to perhaps kill her. What did Olive do to each neighbour to cause ill feeling. Each character had a different story to tell and I couldn't put my finger on which one was the culprit as they all had something to hide.

This book was very pacy and was a real page turner. I really enjoyed this book and this is the second by Jo Spain that I have read and enjoyed. I will be seeking more by this author.

Thank you to the publisher via Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review the book.