The crazy girls, they called them – or at least, Elizabeth liked to think they did. As a teenager in the late 1970s, she was clever, overweight and a perfect victim for the bullies. Then Rachel and her family arrived in town and, for Elizabeth, it was as if a light had been switched on. She was drawn to the bright and beautiful Rachel like a moth to a flame.
Rachel had her own reasons for wanting Elizabeth as a friend, and although their relationship was far from equal, Elizabeth would do anything for Rachel.
Then the first body was discovered.
Twenty years on, Elizabeth wants nothing more than to keep the secrets of her teenage years where they belong: in the past. But another body has been found, and she can’t keep running from what happened.
Can she?
Our Dark Secret, Jenny Quintana
If you are one of those readers who likes to get stuck in early into a novel’s backstory, right back to the early years of what may have pre-empted the enactment of a crime, this slow moving and meticulously detailed mystery will satisfy. Our Dark Secret is the story of a girl who desperately wants to belong, and be loved, but never finds herself being a priority for anyone.
Elizabeth Constance Valentine, she of the very elegant name, is anything but. As a teenager in the 1970’s when willowy young ladies were the ‘it’ girls of the era, Elizabeth would like to fit in with her peers but knows that her differences set her apart. Awkward and shy, the attention and friendship of her peers is something that Elizabeth craves like nothing else.
Parented by the charming Ted and pragmatic Phyllis, Elizabeth tries to stay in the background of the family chaos and lives for those times when the dancing eyes of her father are only directed at her. When the inevitable happens and Elizabeth becomes the product of a broken home, she now has that in common with the beautiful Rachel.
In adulthood, Elizabeth has been unable to move on from the events of one day in 1972. Drifting from one rubbish job to another, twenty five years later her time of reckoning has come. A body has been found in the woods near her childhood home, the knowledge of such being the burning pit of dread in which Elizabeth has lived out her intervening years. Just how far she’d go to protect Rachel is about to be determined once again.
Our Dark Secret takes the reader along with Elizabeth as she struggles to re-invent herself, far away from those who once knew her best. As anyone who has ever been or parented a tween or teenage girl will tell you, those formulative years are incredibly intense and the influence of the opposite gender pales compare to the influence of other girls and women. Our Dark Secret gives appropriate weight to the power of these early female relationships, and the lifelong legacy those years gift to the later years when one is supposedly now an adult.
The obsession Elizabeth has with Rachel does register on the creep factor of what we would now call stalking, but perhaps back in the 1970’s such were the practicalities faced by the young and the fixated. The keeping of a large secret in this book is a burden it would seem mostly borne by one, and Elizabeth’s inability to fully unshackle herself from her past is not a new story but still a very relatable one to read of. From childhood to adulthood, the conspiratorial work that is Our Dark Secret lays it all out on the page for your thoughtful dissection.
Author Jenny Quintana grew up in Essex and Berkshire before studying English Literature in London. Her first novel, The Missing Girl, was published in 2017.
Our Dark Secret, Jenny Quintana
Crime Fiction themes do have a tendency to come in waves, but the past having a direct impact on somebody's present and future is a particularly rich field when tilled well, and Jenny Quintana has done that with considerable skill in OUR DARK SECRET.
Based around the character of Elizabeth Constance Valentine, the storyline moves from Elizabeth's 70's childhood, an only child, awkward, shy, clever, tending towards a bit frumpy and overweight. She adored her father Ted (of the wandering eye) but had a more complicated relationship with her more uptight mother Phyllis, particularly after Ted ran away with the mother of Rachel, the girl that Elizabeth wishes she was, or wishes she could be best, closest friends with.
Moving backwards and forwards through time OUR DARK SECRET takes you through Elizabeth's adult life, drifting from nothing job to nothing job, it's 25 years now since something happened that changed Elizabeth's life completely - and that wasn't just her father running off. A body found in the woods near her childhood home obviously has significance for Elizabeth, and the reader watches, as a slow motion car crash of the present day, becomes the out of control freight train which turned Elizabeth, Rachel and their families lives upside down all those years ago.
The character of Elizabeth is particularly well executed. A scruffy, sort of a no-hoper initially, Elizabeth's stronger, and smarter than readers might think. The influence of a broken home, of teenage friendships, of the sheer mind-altering intensity of friendships sought, lost and kept, had and continues to have a profound impact on Elizabeth. Something happened back in those important, formative years that have stunted her emotional growth ever since then, but she's not a victim, or a figure of derision. There's something overwhelmingly good, compelling and engaging about this woman. Rachel, on the other hand, is more ephemeral, the story of Elizabeth works it's way around her, she's a catalyst maybe, but what happened, what is the secret here, is tricky to nail down until this author is more than ready for you to understand just what happened all those years ago.
It's a fascinating study in damage, obsession, affection and distrust. It's an interesting study of parental failings and teenage stuff ups, and the complications that secrets create. Because there's more than one secret here, and each of them is as damaging and confronting as the last.