According to Stephen King, “If you read Sue Grafton, Lee Child, Janet Evanovich, Michael Connelly, or Nelson DeMille, you’re going tothink Meg Gardiner is a gift from heaven.”
Well, I don’t read any of those authors. But, that’s why there’s a difference between “if” and “only if.” With a name like The Dirty Secrets Club, the book had better deliver, and it does.
San Francisco is plagued with a string of high profile, intensely bizarre suicides, such as a popular fashion designer killing his lover and setting himself on fire, or a U.S. attorney driving off a bridge, killing herself and a number of others. So how does the SFPD respond?
Well, normally there wouldn’t be much of a response at all. The perp is dead. You can have serial murderers, but not serial murder-suiciders. That’s sort of a one shot deal.
But, when all the deaths become linked to the mysterious Dirty Secrets Club, they do what any good police department would do, they call in a forensic psychologist! Why not? Enter Jo Beckett, a specialist in creating psychological profiles of the dead to answer just why they ended up that way.
How convenient for her that there’s suddenly a practical use for her job. I bet it was getting tough to pay the bills. But, it’s well worth accepting the fantasy element and suspending disbelief to get drawn into the fantastically original thrillride Gardiner has created.
Before writing, Gardiner was a lawyer in a small commercial litigation firm, and then taught legal writing at Stanford. She has had a successful writing career in the UK, but only more recently got her break in the US. The story goes like this: Stephen King was going on a trip and wanted a book to read on the plane, so Penguin sent him a box of some of their new releases, and he picked up one of Gardiner’s novels and was instantly hooked. But why did he choose hers in the first place, out of so many other choices, any number of which were probably quite excellent? To what does Meg Gardiner owe this lucky break?
The font was easier to read.
Yeup, that’s what got her the endorsement of one of the world’s most popular writers.
But, in any font, The Dirty Secrets Club is a winner. I’m giving it four stars:
P.S. I met Meg Gardiner at an event at the Tribeca Barnes and Noble. She noticed that something about me seemed sad and lifeless. I told her I was there taking a break from studying for the bar exam. It’s almost as if she could sense it.
