CAIRNS BOOK REVIEW: The Dirty Secrets Club by Meg Gardiner (Hodder & Stoughton)

Jo Beckett is a different kind of profiler; her subjects aren’t living criminals but the dead.

Her job is to determine whether a death is an accident, suicide or murder.

The circumstances of the death of high-powered attorney scream suicide, yet there are disturbing links to two other high-profile deaths in the last four days, and if the pattern continues someone else will suicide in forty-eight.

Jo gets to work, uncovering evidence that the suicides were all involved in a cabal that soon starts putting pressure on Jo’s own dark secret …

This tackles guilt, shame, gratification and the poisonous nature of secrecy but in the fashion of a well-paced suspense film.

While written mainly from Jo’s perspective, Gardiner throws in chapters illustrating the main characters in Jo’s case, all of whom are strongly and strikingly written.

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