Synopsis:
One year after Erica Spencer trips and falls down a flight of stairs at a lavish Halloween party, the residents of the exclusive gated community where she lived have comes to terms with her death and moved on with their lives.

Until one day, a post on the school’s website announces there will be a podcast to expose what really happened on the night of the accident. Six suspects are named, with the podcaster promising to reveal the murderer by the end of the series.
Everyone in this community has secrets to keep, and one of them is already a killer…

This has got to be the juiciest crime thriller I have ever read – it filled all the voids left in my heart by Pretty Little Liars and Desperate Housewives. The main characters are a small group of people living in a gated community in Cheshire, focusing mainly on the women who seem to live the in the centre of a lake of gossip.

What sets the format of this mystery apart from others is that all of the main characters are pretty much equally suspicious and that’s to say: VERY suspicious. There’s no subtle little red herring here and there to whet your appetite, it’s just a rollercoaster of clues and secrets being revealed about everybody. After the death of their friend Erica, almost a year ago, someone has released a podcast which threatens to reveal all of their secrets – this podcast gives a sense of time to the story and keeps everything on track.

The writing style is fantastic and had me hooked from page one, switching perspectives between some of the characters so we get a broad view of what’s going on. The characters are excellently written, they’re all complex and have distinctive personalities, with a range of both likable and dislikeable qualities which make them seem more real.

The grand finale is suitably sensational to keep up with the rest of the book, without being ridiculous. It really is the perfect balance of all the ingredients I look for in a crime thriller.

I’ll be looking for more books by this author to keep the party going- thankfully I can see that she’s already written 6 other books I haven’t read yet.