Jenny Quintana

This is a slow-building family drama-thriller! I enjoyed following Marina as she worked to discover what really happened around her birth. This was a compelling and emotional story! If you are worried about the slow burn in the beginning trust me once you start reading you won't even notice it! There's two timelines, the 1960s and 1990s. Could you imagine something happening in the sixties and the consequences are still being felt 3 decades later! The writing in this book is wonderful! Jenny Quintana has a way of capturing the reades and bringing to life a story full of intrigue and suspense! Great read! Happy reading everyone!
… (altro)

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.

https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/our-dark-secret-jenny-quintana-0… (altro)

In this debut psychological thriller, narrator Anna Flores returns to England after her mother’s death to do what needs to be done—quickly—before returning to her life she’s made in sunny Greece. The gloom and wet of approaching winter soon practically seep into her bones and making her escape turns out to be more difficult than expected on many levels.
There’s the house and all its memory-filled contents to sort through, there’s her father’s second-hand shop, the House of Flores, there’s the friends and neighbors from her youth. Though she has been away for three decades, the house, the shop, the people remind her incessantly about the one thing she will not find: her sister Gabriella. Anna was 12 and her sister 15 in the autumn of 1982 when Gabriella disappeared without a trace. The chapters alternate between the current day and the year Gabriella went missing. You don’t learn much about the decades in between; it’s as if Anna’s life went on pause when she lost her sister.
Anna’s mother, who had been a so-so manager of the shop after her husband’s death, has inexplicably contracted to do a house clearance for Lemon Tree Cottage, a house with difficult memories for Anna. In part out of guilt over abandoning her mother for so long, she resolves, with some reluctance, to finish up that last job for her.
Quintana gets the psychology of the piece just right, I think: the dynamic between the sisters, Anna’s adoration of her sibling and obsession with finding her, the differing relationships the girls have with their parents, the grief that haunts them after Gabriella disappears, and the lengths Anna will go to in order to deny the possibility Gabriella is dead.
Long after the police gave up the search, little Anna persisted. One focus of her ill-conceived investigations was Lemon Tree Cottage and its mysterious occupants. Now, decades later, she has a chance to go through every scrap of belongings from the cottage, and ineluctably, she renews her investigation, knowing and expecting to find nothing.
The book doesn’t contain a lot of graphic violence, but like all villages (at least in mysteries!), this one has its dark secrets. For me, the secondary characters were believable types; I know people just like them. The voice of the youthful Anna and the 40-year-old Anna and handled believably too, in a smooth writing style that carries you deeper and deeper into the complicated past of the Flores family.… (altro)