I recommend that you read 'A Secret Worth Keeping' in a single sitting if you can. It's a book to experience not to ponder over.

What is the experience? You know those rides at the big theme parks where they strap you in, drop you from a great height at scream-making speed and then throw you around corners? It's that kind of reading experience. To enjoy it to the full, you have to surrender all control and go wherever the plot takes you.

The book opens with a prologue featuring a fatal car crash. I don't know who was involved and I don't find out how it relates to anything else until almost the end of the book but it's important to the plot and it gets the story off to an action-packed, explanation-free start that should have set my expectations.

Except that the next part of the story seemed more conventional, so I dropped my guard. I watched a couple who seemed to be in the first throws of lust, when they knew little about each other except that heading to an isolated cabin in the mountains for a weekend of sex is an irresistible idea. She's still not entirely comfortable with him and is watching his reactions closely. He's willing to put up with anything, including a surprisingly dusty, ill-prepared cabin, as long as they can both get their clothes off as soon as possible. Then the story stopped being conventional and someone ended up dead. The who and how of that death changed everything and I knew that I had no idea of what was really going on.

Then I got a 'x days earlier' set of rollbacks from three different points of view that sort of got me to how the death happened. Except, even then, I knew that I was missing something and that everything would change again.

From there on the pace of the plot kept accelerating. Things kept getting worse for everyone involved, no one was who they seemed to be and everyone had secrets. I could see this wasn't going to end well but I couldn't guess at for whom or how.

There are two women in the story. Both of them come across as dangerous and occasionally as desperate yet both of them were easier to like than the main male character who had the irrepressible self-confidence of a mediocre middle-class white guy who knows he's doing something he shouldn't but expects to get away with it, who knows that he's not a very nice guy but tells himself that he's not a very bad guy either and he's just following his nature.

I loved the inventiveness of the plot and how the action was lubricated by low-key dark humour that seemed to be about veniality but might actually be hiding anger and malice.

There were times, towards the end of the story, when the plot twisted so fast and so far that it might have challenged my ability to suspend disbelief but I was having such a good time by then that I didn't care.

I had a lot of fun with this book and I'll be hitting Drew Strickland's back catalogue to see if I can find another rollicking ride like 'A Secret Worth Keeping'. ( )