Sarah Keyes has the perfect life. A high-flying job in a law firm, a beautiful daughter and a house to die for. So how does she find herself looking in through the kitchen window while another woman enjoys it all?
When Sarah takes pity on a struggling young graduate who can't get a job, she thinks she's doing the right thing. She's being kind, generous and helpful to others, as she always is.
But as Sarah allows the younger woman into her home, her law firm and even her family, is there more to this pretty youngster than meets the eye? And how can Sarah reclaim the life she has built?
A sensational, page-turning read, perfect for fans of Marian Keyes and Patricia Scanlan.
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9780008140762
Claudia Carroll is a great author and I look forward to every new book. 'Our Little Secret' is another great book with a strong female lead character in Sarah Keyes. A career woman who works hard but also has a lot to give, working hard in her legal career. It is through her giving back in a legal aid clinic that she meets a young girl who Sarah helps to have a better life but is all as it seems.
As other reviewers have said, the cover is misleading. It looks like it will be a cosy read however it is really a book that grips the reader and keeps their attention to the very end. It is a book which has great characters although there is something that unsettled me and left me wondering throughout. There is a definite message of take care of who you trust!
I have been given an extract to share with my blog readers to get you interested ....
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that when every other aspect of
your life is ticking over nicely, something you least expect is bound to go
belly-up. And in my case, by the end of May it was my already precarious
financial situation.
No matter where I looked, and believe me, I went through every
household expense with the finest of toothcombs, I could find absolutely
nothing I could possibly cut back on. Darcy’s school fees? Forget it. I
considered that money to be sacrosanct. She was actually doing well in school
for the first time since Tom and I broke up. She was even hanging around with a
lovely new friend, Sophie, who I liked enormously and, better still, who
seemed to be a wonderful influence on her.
Not so long ago Darcy had seemed inseparable from Abi Kinsella who’d
struck me as a troubled kid who trouble seemed to follow. On the other hand,
this new pal Sophie was bright, intelligent and hard-working, but with the
effortless knack of somehow making it all appear cool.
And, thankfully, by some miracle this was beginning to rub off on
Darcy. Her grades were now as good as they’d ever been and she actually seemed happy to head
off to school every morning, without my having to nag her out of bed, wrestle
with her to eat a breakfast, then physically shove the girl out the hall door.
So yes, her school fees may
well have been bloody extortion, but I’d rather have starved myself before
ever cutting back on them.
The house was the other huge
monthly expense that was now turning into a giant millstone around my neck. The
mortgage payments were now a whopping €1500 a month and
it seemed to gobble up most of my salary. To the extent that by the time that
and Darcy’s fees were covered, not to mention grocery shopping/car
insurance/petrol, there never seemed to be a single bean left to actually live
off.
By May, I was at my wits’ end. All I ever seemed to do was work, I
thought in frustration, so how come by the end of each and every month, I was
left counting the days till my next payment went through?
The answer hit me sharper than a chilli finger in the eye one quiet
weekday morning in work. 8am and, as usual, I was late into the office
(traffic) to be greeted by a disgruntled eye-roll from Bernie, which I chose to
ignore. (Always, always the best policy with Bernie.)
Meanwhile I plonked down at my desk and frantically tried to get up to
speed on the McKinsey brief, before a big meeting we were due to have later on
that morning with the mighty George McKinsey himself. Or as he liked to style
himself, George McKinsey III. Almost as if he was a character from Shakespeare.
To fill you in, ‘George McKinsey III’ was a self-described businessman
and entrepreneur at the top of his game: a player who headed up one of those spidery
global corporations with offices that seemed to stretch from Birmingham to
Belize and back again. But after an intricately thorough tax audit, he was now
facing possible tax avoidance charges and that’s where Sloan Curtis came in.
However, as you can imagine
with a company that expansive, the legal end of it was a never-ending
nightmare. So it was effectively left to myself, Harry and Bernie to somehow
stich together a defense that would hold water in court under
cross-examination. We’d all been slaving away on the case for months by then,
and the more we uncovered about McKinsey’s tax affairs, the more that seemed to
lurk underneath.
Thank you to Avon for inviting me to take part in the blog tour and for a copy of the book in return for an honest review.
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