Review: Our Little Secret by Darren O’Sullivan

Title: Our Little Secret

Author: Darren O’Sullivan

Published: February 2019, HQ

Format: Paperback, 368 pages

Source: Publisher

Summary: 

A deserted train station: A man waits. A woman watches.

Chris
is ready to join his wife. He’s planned this moment for nearly a year.
The date. The

time. The train. But he hadn’t factored in Sarah.

So
when Sarah walks on to the platform and sees a man swaying at the edge
she assumes he’s just had too much to drink. What she doesn’t expect is
to stop a suicide.

As Sarah becomes obsessed with discovering the secrets that Chris is clearly hiding, he becomes obsessed with stopping her, protecting her.

But there are some secrets that are meant to stay buried…

My thoughts: I love a good thriller but not all have to be fast-paced, edge of your seat action-based reads. Sometimes a slow-burner is a nice change of pace and that is exactly what we have here. 

I loved that this story is told from two perspectives that are equally engaging and the mystery as to what happened to Chris’s wife Julia. Both Chris and Sarah are damaged souls. Chris cannot live without his wife and has decided he wants to join her and has a plan to do so. But the night he is ready to carry out his plan, Sarah comes upon him. Sarah’s life is a mess. She has just broken up with her boyfriend and has no money. She decides to wait on the train platform when she comes upon Chris and realizes what he is up to. Making contact with this stranger, she changes both their lives.

This was definitely an interesting book as it portrayed the inner psyche of the human mind and the dark places it can go when it feels so lost. Sarah feels she is responsible for Chris now that she has saved his life, whether he wants her to or not. And Chris is in such despair after his wife’s death that he is willing to take his own life.

This is definitely a character-driven story and as I mentioned, it is a slow-burning one at that. The tension slowly burns as things start to come together. There were some points when I started to guess where things where headed, but it in no way detracted from my enjoyment of this book. And to think this is a debut novel – I cannot wait to see what comes next from this author!