Secrets Never Die

July 31, 2023
Seventeen-year-old Sam Hall—a former child TV star with a haunted past—has just arrived at his friend Dom’s annual Halloween party when he and some classmates, including his girlfriend and Dom’s sister, vacate the festivities and head into the woods. Every year, the tight-knit group engages in a secret ritual at the Dark Place, an abandoned shack in the forest: one by one, they enter the structure alone and confess a secret they’ve been hiding. While Sam is inside the Dark Place, he hears a terrible scream, and exits the shack to find that it’s been pelted with blood-filled eggs. After the group returns to Dom’s house, they begin receiving creepy text messages from someone named Sasha Craven (“Don’t be shy. I just want to be friends”). They dismiss the occurrence and move on from that night. But Sam wrestles with a feeling of constantly being watched, and when the unsettling texts evolve into threatening messages about each of the teens’ darkest secrets, cracks begin forming in the group’s once-solid friendships. Ralph (Lock the Doors) relies on familiar thriller tropes to craft a fast-paced mystery steeped in malevolent atmosphere. Most characters are white. Ages 13–up.

August 1, 2023
A group of friends learn that secrets can be dangerous when a mysterious stalker turns their lives upside down. Former child star Sam and friends Haran, Dom, Elisha, and Lauren have a Halloween ritual: They go to a hut in the woods near their hometown of Hayschurch and take turns inside it confessing their darkest secrets. They always leave feeling better, but this year someone overhears them and starts tormenting each member of the group: throwing blood-filled eggs at the hut, sending menacing texts, leaving dolls' heads in their lockers, and surreptitiously following and taking videos of them. One of the videos includes an image of the mystery sender wearing a creepy mask, and Sam is sure he's seen it before. Once he remembers the connection, the teens realize that their situation is part of something bigger and darker going back long before they were born. The friends show a great deal of ingenuity as they investigate the few clues they have to work with. Genuinely suspenseful scenes keep the tension ratcheting up, and short chapters, plenty of well-timed twists, and an unexpected ending make this a quick, satisfying read, though readers may question whether the teens' secrets are really terrible enough to justify the lengths they go to protect them. Contextual details point to a British setting, and names offer the only clues to ethnicity. Fans of thrillers and stories about small-town secrets will be turning the pages late into the night. (Thriller. 12-18)

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September 1, 2023

Gr 8 Up-High schooler Sam Hall and his friends Naveen, Dom, and Elisha have a yearly Halloween ritual: to privately confess their most closely held secrets at a shack in the woods they call the Dark Place. But the yearly confessional is interrupted by the mysterious Sasha Craven, who threatens to share these secrets with their classmates and families. What follows is a twisty narrative of revelations as Sam tries to unmask Sasha while simultaneously confronting the past. Sam carries the guilt of a house fire that both ended his acting career on the show Future Force and left his father with physical and emotional scars. Sam's friends Dom and Naveen also hold secrets connected to his acting career, and Sasha uses these to fracture Sam's trust with his friend group. Sasha also uses threatening videos and a number of mysterious accomplices in creepy masks to accost Sam and escalate the conflict. When Sasha's identity is revealed (requiring a secondary narrative with considerable explanation and flashbacks), it is difficult to understand why the friends were targeted at all, and Sam in particular. This book shines in its fast pace and engaging opener, and the twists and unknown accomplices will keep readers guessing. However, the late reveals and unexplained motives of all of Sasha's helpers make the conclusion less than satisfying. VERDICT A readable, stand-alone thriller that hits the mark in suspense but misses in motive and plotting.-Michael Van Wambeke

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