No One Needs to Know by Kevin O'Brien

This was my first post-exam book that I finished, and I'm glad that I chose it. It's not light-hearted, but gripping and enough for me to forget about school (to a certain extent - since I still have assignments going on).

No One Needs to Know follows Laurie Trotter, who in my opinion, has the worst luck ever. Not only did her husband die in Afghanistan, the guy she made a mistake with has started stalking her, and his crazy brother and followers are determined to grab her baby from her. When things escalate and she has to move away, she ends up working for a Cheryl, who seems to be surrounded by death. And while my description may seem quite flippant, the book was anything but.

There are basically two plot lines here - Cheryl and her stalker situation, and the 7/7/70 murder case. The 7/7/70 murder case is something like Charles Mason, with a hippie-ish guy and his followers killing celebrities in a gruesome way. And now, a movie is being made about it. But, there's a secret behind the case, and poor Laurie is caught up in it.

While I'm not too crazy about the book having two such big storylines (one of them was a bit neglected), I can sort of see the rationale for it. One plot (the stalker one), kick started the other. But it did leave me confused as to which part of the story I should have focused on at first, until the story found its stride and the 7/7/70 case took over.

Personally, I really enjoyed this book. My thumb was basically going tap, tap, tap on the iPad as I tried to read as fast as possible because I wanted to find out what happened. I finished it in two days (I started reading it yesterday, and even had it as my Teaser Tuesday), and that was only because I had to work from 1-5, and do translation work before and after that. It would have been a day otherwise.

I liked Laurie and her little son Joey (when he appeared), and thought the characters were pretty interesting. If you can follow the two plots and multiple POVS, you'll probably enjoy this book too.

Disclaimer: I got a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a free and honest review.