Aldrich University is rocked to its core with scandal and intrigue when a hacker dumps 40,000 people's emails--the entire faculty, staff, students, alums--onto an easily searchable database. Affairs and scandals immediately start leaking, but these emails become ticking time bombs that explode when Kit Manning's handsome husband, Dr. Greg Strasser, is murdered.
Shepard throws every cliché imaginable at the reader and then artfully massages them into a brilliant narrative told in the voices of the many women involved in the story who, having managed to make victims of one sort or another of themselves, all emerge victorious, each in her own fashion ... Everyone is hiding a closetful of secrets, which, when finally revealed, provide some excellent misdirection and a few OMG moments, until one final and shocking truth emerges. Fans of domestic suspense will devour this one.
None of the suspects are likable: Kit is shallow and vain and constantly looking for the excitement of love and lust; Laura is wishy-washy with an unbelievable story line. Raina is a vapid seductress. The plot is all over the place, a crazy mashup of Mr. Robot, CSI TV shows, and Real Housewives. The #MeToo movement is also thrown into the mix ... Shepard is very well known for her Pretty Little Liars series. Fans of the book and adapted television show will most likely enjoy her latest.
... exceptional ... By giving each woman more than sufficient motivation to have killed Greg (Lynn and Laura also have reason to suspect their spouses) and making them sympathetic, the author ensures that the reader is pulled between revulsion and the urge to accept each one’s self-justifications for her behavior. In this viscerally satisfying thriller, Shepard forces readers to contemplate the inescapable aftereffects of impulsive poor choices.
