What a good book! It's enthralling and entertaining, once you start you cannot put it down.
I read a lot of very good review of this book and was curious.
Once I started I was hooked and I can say that Ms Spain is a master storyteller.
The cast of characters was fascinating, they're well written and fleshed out. They're not likable and each of them has secrets that will be revealed during the book.
I liked the couple of detectives, they were the most likable characters.
The inhabitants of the community sometimes seemed to be seen in a satirical way, each with their quirk and secrets.
The end was totally unexpected and it made me gasp and laugh at the same time.
I think there's a lot of humour and I liked it.
Even if this is a very modern book I thought there are some echo of the mysteries of the Golden Age and, being a fan of those mysteries, this is a compliment :)
A very good book, I look forward to reading other books by Ms Spain.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to Quercus Books and Netgalley for this ARC

If you are a fan of Liane Moriarty’s books, then you are really going to love the new gripping novel by Jo Spain. Set in an exclusive gated community where everyone is hiding something, DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS is a brilliant and twisty novel that I found really hard to put down. This is not a surprise for me because it happens every time I read one of her novels.

There are seven houses in Withered Vale: two families with children, a single mother with her teenage daughter, a retired couple, and two single men. And then there is Olive Collins. In her fifties, single, and retired, Olive has been dead in her house for three months before her neighbours noticed and they did notice only because of the bad smell coming from her house. Frank and Emma are the detectives who are trying to figure out if Olive’s death was an accident or a murder and, as they interview the community, they discover that everyone in Withered Vale wanted Olive gone.

The story is told from the points of views of all the characters in the novel, including Olive who tells her side of the story from the grave (which, by the way, reminded me a lot of Desperate Housewives). Jo Spain created a cast of well-crafted and diverse characters that fit perfectly in the story. Even though they live in close proximity, there is no sense of community between the residents of Withered Vale. They don’t like or trust each other. And I didn’t like some of them, while I cheered on some of the others (especially Alison Daly and her daughter Holly). I loved the characters of Frank and Emma, the detectives investigating Olive’s death. Frank is in his fifties, three months from retirement, and tired of all the bad things he sees in his job. On the other hand, Emma is young, enthusiastic, and eager to prove herself. Together they make an odd pair and their exchanges make an entertaining read.

I was fascinated by the setting of the novel. The community of Withered Vale should be safe with its gates and alarms, but it feels more like a prison and when one of them is found dead, the police doesn’t even think to investigate outside of the community.

DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS kept me completely hooked. I found the story masterfully plotted: with each chapter I read, a new suspect would come up, making it impossible to figure out the killer and I loved the ending which was brilliant and completely unexpected. Chilling, twisty, and captivating, DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS is definitely another must-read from Jo Spain.

*Many thanks to Jo Spain, Quercus Books and Netgalley for providing me with ARC in exchange for my honest review.*
My second book by Jo Spain turned out enjoyable. The idea of giving a voice to the victim alongside the other characters is quite intriguing. Yes, this is a murder story but also a story of secrets, some dirty, that are revealed in due course as in any good story. The atmospehere in a small community who live in a posh residential area is dense and gradually they learn a lot about themselves while confronted with the suspicious death of their neighbour.

‘Withered Vale’
Gated, Exclusive
6 Neighbours, Many Many Secrets
1 Neighbour Dead
For weeks
In Her Armchair
No One Knew
No One Cared
Disgraceful
Poor Olive Collins......she didn’t deserve that.....did she??

Dirty little secrets, and they abound, almost jumping from house to house and neighbour to neighbour in this wonderfully dark whodunit
‘Trust none of them’ is my advice, they all have reason to want Olive dead...she misses nothing and knows all, she knows way way too much....
Its soooo good I want to start it again as I am writing this!
The style of writing is easy to fall into as it smoothly takes you through each house and neighbour, who they are, who they REALLY are and what they were doing the day Olive died
The Characters are each just superb and you will like, dislike, trust, untrust and feel many more emotions for each one of them until the truth about each is known!!!
The story itself is fast and at times brutal and there is not a second of daydream time, its all happening constantly as you turn ( or flick ) each page ( or screen! )
Fabulous narrative from each neighbour inc Olive!!! and what really happened that day could go any of so many ways until you get to the last chapter and all is revealed and you dont know wether to laugh or cry be happy or sad, its a shocker!
The author has created a very cleverly put together awesome read and will be reading more of Jo Spain’s books
Wonderful read, I loved every sentence
10/10 5 Stars

I read The Confession by Jo Spain last year and thought it was a brilliant, sophisticated thriller. Dirty Little Secrets has been high on my anticipated read list for 2019 and I was not disappointed. Set in a small gated community outside Dublin, Dirty Little Secrets is a tightly plotted book containing characters we can’t quite trust, a death and two detectives who realise that something is amiss.

Withered Vale is an exclusive community which contains beautiful, extravagant homes lived in by wealthy and glamorous people. In the centre of this cul-de-sac is a small cottage owned by Olive Collins. Her cottage is incongruous amongst this wealth, she lived there alone before the developers built the Vale around her, and it is in this cottage that she dies one March evening. It is three months before her body is discovered badly decomposed in an armchair, but did she die of natural causes? And more importantly, why hadn’t her neighbours realised?

What I really like about Jo Spain’s books is the examination of human nature and in Dirty Little Secrets we have the full spectrum on show. Marriages in crises, a Lothario, a 30 something man with a porn addiction, a single mother living with her teenage daughter and a retired couple enjoying copious holidays, it is all right there in Withered Vale. Then there is Olive. Single, lonely and dare I say it a little desperate? Desperate for love and affection and desperate to fit in she tries to ingratiate herself with her neighbours. The thing is, she is a little annoying and the other inhabitants are less than enamoured with sharing their lives with her. But is she annoying enough to murder?

This book is chock full of, er, dirty little secrets which are slowly and tantalisingly revealed to us. It is a page turner of a book with hints of dark deeds just outside of reach and through a clever narrative structure the whole picture slowly comes into focus. It is through chapters which alternate between the inhabitants of Withered Vale, Detectives Frank Brazil and Emma Child and Olive herself that we discover the long held grudges, petty actions and devastating tragedies that occur behind closed doors.

I loved and adored DI Frank Brazil and his curmudgeonly persona. He and Emma are a great partnership and it was striking that as the fractures and the fissures in the Vale widened these two these two seemingly opposite characters are brought closer together. There are some lovely tender moments of friendship between these two which were heartwarming to read.

Dirty Little Secrets reminded me of a Liane Moriarty book with its mystery, suspense, secrets and a cast of characters with things to hide. I loved the slow unfurling of the plot and was blindsided on more than once occasion. It is a wonderfully written book and had me guessing right to the end.

My Review: Dirty Little Secrets is Jo Spain’s latest psychological thriller and as I loved her previous book The Confession I was very excited to start this one.

OMG I absolutely LOVED this book and devoured it in a day – I even woke up at 3.30am thinking about the book and finished it at 4.30am because I couldn’t wait to find out more.

In a secured, affluent gated community are 7 houses with seven neighbours all with HUGE secrets. When one of the neighbours, Olive Collins is found dead inside her house, having been left to rot for 3 months, the police start to investigate how, why and when and more importantly realise that almost every neighbour had reason to want Olive dead.

I absolutely LOVED each character narrating their version of the truth and Olive telling us her side of the story from beyond the grave was utter genuis. If you can imagine Desperate Housewives directed by Quentin Tarantino then you might get an inkling of how dark and deliciously disturbing Dirty Little Secrets is.

Fabulous characters, loved all their back stories, loved the relationship between the 2 police detectives, loved the pace, the humour, the style of writing, the amusing twists and turns along the way and I am pretty confident this is going into my Top Ten of 2019 – 100% recommended.

This is a really good read. There are so many secrets in this small gated community. Olive was nosey and tried to find out people's secrets and use that knowledge to her advantage. When she is found dead there are a number of suspects. This book is very well written and was a pleasure to read. I will definitely be looking out for more books by this author.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

would like to thank netgalley and the publisher for letting me read another amazing book by jo spain

a quiet little cul de sac
a small neighbourhood
one very dead body, its only when the mass of blue bottles escape that the neighbours think to go looking where olive is

olive, there is one in every town, city and street, in fact i think i live opposite one...so reading this i felt i was there, that this has happened to me, there were people that i could recognise as living in my street and as the story went on the more this book gripped me...couldnt put it down

who murdered olive in a gated community, things were afoot and not easy to understand as each neighbour had had a run in with olive...

a great book and i loved every so often you had a small chapter on olive...and her take on things...well written and captivating, each neighbour has a story to tell some are heartbreaking and some just plain normal but get a busybody like olive and it can turn any sane person...

keep an eye out for this one

I loved this book. Who knew one little community could hide so many suspicious and damaged relationships? I'm a big fan of Jo's Inspector Reynolds series but the recent stand alone novels are just as gripping.

Dirty Little Secrets is the perfect title for this thriller as it is as exactly that and full of them.
Olive Collins is dead in her house but she’s been dead virtually three months and considering she lives in a gated community of 7 houses you’d think one of the neighbours would have missed her but the further you go into this thriller the more you find out that Olive was a lonely woman who tried to be friendly but didn’t quite fit in.
This was a book I flew through I loved how we followed Frank and Emma through their investigations as the lead police investigators and how we saw the pair grow closer as the story went along. This thriller is set in the past for Olive’s chapters and present tense for the occupants of the other houses, this I felt worked well within the layout of the chapters.
A slow burner that kept me wanting to know more and I really enjoyed this whodunnit.
I would like to thank Netgalley and Quercus Books for this ARC I received in exchange for an honest review.

Olive is not a nice person. She thinks she is and she never gets why people keep becoming irritated with her. But soon we will get to know Olive and we will understand.

Withered Vale is a small gated community. Each person who lives there has a secret. And Olive has the talent to find out what the secret is. So when she seems to have disappeared for 3 months everybody is secretly happy about it. But it turns out that Olive has not disappeared. She is still in her house, dead and a feast for the bugs. The police find out that it was not a natural dead. So who of the neighbors wanted Olive to be dead?

This book is more of a slow burner but it does not fail to entertain. At first I had problems to keep all those people apart but after a while they became real characters and I knew who was who. There are multiple POV including dead Olive who tells us what she found out about the pasts of her neighbors. Not all of the secrets are scandalous; some of them are a bit underwhelming. But it still was a decent whodunit. It is an easy read and it keeps you guessing until the end.

Excellent murder mystery! A murder in a gated community with a limited pool of suspects made for a really good story. My first book by this author and will be looking for more!

A quiet gated community becomes the centre of a murder investigation as one of the residents is found dead. Any of the other residents could have been guilty, but who was it? Each of them has a motive and each could have killed the single lady.
Not read any of Jo’s books before, but a great read that will have you captivated from beginning to end.

“I was doing okay, sitting there on the chair, silently decomposing.”

The fact that part of this story was apparently being narrated by the late Olive Collins from beyond the grave was an early clue that as crime novels go, this one might be a bit different. It definitely had a faintly tongue in cheek flavour at times, particularly near the beginning, and I was reminded a bit of Laura Wilson’s The Other Woman, which had a similar feel (and a decomposing body). This impression wore off after a while, though.

How could Olive lie, or rather sit, undiscovered for so long in a very small community (seven houses) where the inhabitants all know each other? It seems all her neighbours have secrets to hide, and there’s plenty for veteran detective Frank Brazil and his younger colleague, Emma Child, to unravel. I suppose if you choose to live in a place with a name like Withered Vale, it’s not going to end well.

There are certainly classic mystery elements - a probable murder, a limited pool of suspects (the residents of the gated community), all of whom have something to hide, all with a possible motive. While at first sight many seem like stereotypes (ladies’ man Ron, earth mother Lily), they all have hidden depths. The end was both surprising and satisfying.

Another excellent read from Jo Spain, with a rather different flavour to it than most.

Withered Vale is a gated housing community. One resident Olive Collins has lived there the longest. Now she has been found dead in her house. Not only that she has been dead for three months and non of her neighbours seemed to notice.

I really enjoyed this book and found it fun to read. Six neighbours with six secrets. Each of the residents had a run in with Olive, and all of them potentially could have killed her.

At first I had to keep up with who was who, who was married to who and which house they lived in. However I soon got into the story. Each chapter was told from the view of the neighbours and how they were connected to Olive, also the two detectives investigating the death. As each character's story unfolds then all the secrets begin to unfold.

This story was very intriguing and as it progressed it became for me a game of Cluedo. Which resident hated Olive enough to perhaps kill her. What did Olive do to each neighbour to cause ill feeling. Each character had a different story to tell and I couldn't put my finger on which one was the culprit as they all had something to hide.

This book was very pacy and was a real page turner. I really enjoyed this book and this is the second by Jo Spain that I have read and enjoyed. I will be seeking more by this author.

Thank you to the publisher via Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review the book.

It wasn't the smell that alerted the privileged residents of the gated community of Withered Vale to the fact that something was amiss at number four.It was the black,menacing,humming mass of bluebottles rising out of Olive Collin's chimney.

The neighbours insist that they are shocked when it transpires that Olive's body has been rotting in her home for three months. And yet none of them had thought to check up on her when she vanished from sight.

When Detective Frank Brazil and his young colleague Emma Child start to ask questions, they discover that the neighbours lives are not as flawless as they seem. In fact, the people living in Withered Vale have more issues and secrets than you would see on a whole series of Jeremy Kyle. It seems that everyone of them has something to hide,someone to lose and everything to gain from her death.

Dirty Little Secrets is a enthralling,character driven who did or didn't do it that is voiced by numerous,realistic characters including Frank,Emma and lonely,manipulative,interfering Olive. All the vivid characters had flaws,issues and secrets ranging from porn addiction,affairs,denial to mental and physical abuse,greed and jealousy. My favourite characters were Emma,Matt,Alison,Holly and young Wolf, the rest of the characters were not very likeable although I did change my opinion on a couple of them by the time I finished the book.

I loved Dirty Little Secrets,just as much as I loved The Confession which was one of my favourite reads of last year. I was totally enthralled by every character's part of the story and loved that most of the chapters ended on a cliff hanger,giving the reader a very bad case of Just one more chapter syndrome. Although the story is narrated by numerous characters,the chapters are clearly annotated and the writers words flow with ease drawing you into her characters fictional world. I liked how some of the characters changed as the story unfolded and they realised that the way they were living their lives had to change. I was hooked in from the very first page and genuinely didn't want to put this gripping thriller down. Absolutely amazing book,worth far more than five stars and very highly recommended by little old me.

Unfortunately I found the book very slow and not appealing. Although it was a thriller, I did not look forward to find out what would happen next. Bit disappointed, Stopped reading half way through the book.

One thing you can be sure of in a Jo Spain novel is indeed the uncovering of dirty little secrets, although in her DI Tom Reynolds series the guilty secrets are more likely to be not so little, often revealing a dark side to Irish history and society that has been long kept hidden. Spain's second standalone novel (after the thrilling The Confession) gives the author the opportunity to delve into other perhaps more familiar and universally recognisable human motivations that give rise to crime in Dirty Little Secrets, but of course Jo Spain has her own very distinctive take on the subject that opens up other issues related to living in a small isolated community.

So many in fact that - like any good crime thriller - there are any number of possible suspects who may have killed Olive Collins. There are only six houses in the exclusive Withered Vale gated community in Wicklow, but it's taken 3 months for any of the neighbours to notice that Olive has been lying dead and decomposing in No.4. Not only that but there are signs of suspicious activity around her death, and as police detectives Frank Brazil and Emma Child start to question the neightbours about Olive, they find that potentially any one of them might have had the motive and opportunity and maybe even good reason to murder her.

There's not anything particularly new about that kind of whodunit, and Jo Spain has proved to be able to point the finger of suspicion on any number of potential killers before in her previous books only to completely blindside the reader with terrific twists. What the author has here however that she doesn't have so much in her Tom Reynolds books is a greater multiplicity of views, a greater diversity of character, race and personality and associated attitudes that have been fostered in the society they live in; a very closed society that thrives on gossip and is always on the lookout for scandal from outsiders who don't fit in with their narrow views and moral outlook.

Withered Vale is very much that kind of society in the much more manageable form of six families; a closed community, a watching and observing community, a judgemental one that is quick to act out its own form of social justice. To fit in and not be ostracised means you must not draw attention to your differences; any expression of individuality must be suppressed, which means people inevitably keep aspects of their lives secret, and sometimes with good reason. When you have people keeping secrets however, they can develop into a mass of contradictions and you usually find there is someone like Olive Collins ready to poke their nose into what dirty little secrets are being hidden by them.

Frank and Emma's investigation into Withered Vale gradually uncovers the latent tensions between its residents and even the potential homicidal urges they might have had towards a busybody like Olive poking around in backgrounds that they'd rather keep quiet about. It's a classic Agatha Christie situation mixed Jo Spain's usual pertinent observations on Irish people and society, but Spain has another little twist or two to offer in Dirty Little Secrets. One is that the police detectives Frank and Emma have their own little secret histories, and the other is that so too does Olive, who even though dead reveals her own view of her involvement in the lives of each of characters that have led to her demise.

Needless to say, with gradual revelations about other people's lives, their peculiarities and the secrets they might be keeping, as well as the suspicion falling first on one person then another as to who is most likely to commit murder, Jo Spain once again provides an addictive thriller that is thoughtful and well-observed in its social and character detail.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, although I didn't see it as a psychological thriller, more of a mystery, it didn't detract from the book. Olive lives in a gated community called Withered Vale with 6 other houses...

Olive's body is discovered having been left to rot for over 3 months, why did none of the 6 neighbours realise, surely someone knew something, she was not see or heard from in that length of time.

As the investigation pursues, it turns out, all the neighbours had their own reasons/secrets for wanting Olive dead but which one of them did it?

With Olive telling her story from the grave, the story is untwisted to reveal the truth.

Overall a great read which will keep you captivated, nobody really knows what goes on behind closed doors!

Many thanks to Netgalley and Quercus Books for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

What an impressive book. At no point did I guess the outcome. At not point did I particularly like any of the characters either, as they were all slightly on the despicable side.

Despite that I couldn't stop reading this, and I did have some sympathy for a few of the neighbours as various aspects of their lives emerged.

There are 7 households in Withered Vale - Olive's and her 6 neighbours. Of those at some point or another she has upset every last person in the Vale, and no one even notices she hasn't been about for three months, until a large number of bluebottles are spotted above her chimney.

This sets in motion a compelling story, where I was hooked on seeing the case from all the neighbour's points of view, the police and also Olive herself.

There are so many different secrets at play here, that the second one was revealed you started thinking that person had the perfect motive, and then within another chapter or two, you are left reeling and thinking in another direction.

The unpredictability of this book is its sheer brilliance. i just knew I had to keep reading it, until I finished it at close to 3am, when I am now writing this review.

This is the second book I have read by Jo Spain, and the second I wasn't able to put down. While I was reading I was completely under this talented author's spell as I whizzed through the chapters and tried to piece together just what happened to Olive.

A dark book, that will keep you on your toes and is from an author that is definitely one to keep an eye on. Highly recommended.

Thank you to Quercus and Netgalley for this copy which I have reviewed honestly and voluntarily.