Another Freida McFadden book down—and this one took me less than two days!
Want to Know a Secret? was another quick, twisty Freida read. It may not be one of my absolute favorites from her, but it was fun, completely entertaining, and ridiculously easy to fly through.
Amazon Summary
Everyone has secrets.
YouTube baking sensation April Masterson knows the secret to the perfect gooey brownies. Or how to make key lime squares that will melt in your mouth. But if you keep watching her offline, you may find out some other secrets about April. Secrets she’d rather you didn’t know.
Like where did her son go when he snuck out of the house? What was she doing with the local soccer coach behind fogged windows?
And what’s buried in her backyard?
Everyone has secrets. Some are worse than others.
April’s secrets are enough to destroy her.
I’ll make sure of that.
My Thoughts
This book was nuts.
We start out from April’s perspective. She’s a successful YouTube baker who seems to have built a pretty fantastic life for herself. She has a beautiful home in a great suburban neighborhood, a husband, a son, and friends nearby—most notably her best friend Julie and Maria, who recently moved into the neighborhood.
Everything looks pretty darn good from the outside.
Except I know Freida McFadden.
So when April starts receiving threatening text messages from someone using a burner phone, I already know better than to assume I’m getting the whole story.
And I’m definitely not.
April isn’t exactly what I’d call a reliable narrator.
Eventually, we get Julie’s perspective, and suddenly we’re seeing April very differently. Julie knows things about her best friend that we don’t. She knows April is dangerous.
Even April’s own husband knows she’s dangerous.
And Julie is determined to make sure April finally gets what’s coming to her.
Because April hasn’t just been keeping a few harmless secrets.
She’s killed before.
April murdered Courtney, her husband’s former secretary—the same secretary he was having an affair with.
Then there’s Brianna, his new secretary.
And she’s pregnant.
You can probably see why this isn’t exactly great news for April.
April is completely obsessed with holding on to the life she’s created. She has the beautiful house, the successful baking channel, the family, and the picture-perfect neighborhood.
She’s not going to let anyone take that away from her.
And she is willing to do some truly terrible things to keep it.
Then Brianna turns up dead.
At this point, all signs seem to point directly at April.
She’s already killed one of her husband’s mistresses. Now another woman connected to him is dead. April has lied repeatedly, manipulated people, and proven she’s capable of murder.
Of course she killed Brianna.
Except…
She didn’t.
Because apparently we didn’t have enough crazy people in this book yet.
Enter April’s mother.
April had used her mother as an alibi and then basically tucked her away in a nursing home. Her mother, confused and angry about what April had done to her, decides to take matters into her own hands.
She intends to kill April.
Except in her confused state, the woman she actually kills is Brianna.
WHAT?!
So April really is a murderer.
She’s just not that murderer.
And that pretty much sums up the insanity of this book.
One of the things I enjoyed most was how Freida kept changing my understanding of April. At first, she’s the woman being terrorized. Someone is sending her threatening messages. Strange things are happening. Her life seems to be falling apart around her.
You naturally wonder who’s doing this to her.
Then the perspective changes, more information comes out, and you start realizing that maybe the better question is:
What has April done to make someone want to do this to her?
A lot, apparently.
And Julie isn’t exactly an innocent bystander either. Neither is April’s husband. Then we have April’s mother attempting to murder her own daughter and accidentally killing someone else instead.
These people are ALL crazy.
Thankfully, April eventually gets arrested, and after everything we learn about her, I wasn’t exactly sad to see it happen.
What I liked most about Want to Know a Secret? wasn’t necessarily one giant shocking twist. It was the constant peeling back of layers. Every time I thought I understood one of these characters, Freida gave me another piece of information that changed things.
It also plays with something Freida does really well: making you trust a character’s version of events just long enough for you to get comfortable before showing you how much they’ve left out.
Was this my favorite Freida McFadden book?
No.
Did I still finish it in less than two days?
Absolutely.
It’s fast, fun, ridiculous in the best possible way, and filled with people making increasingly terrible decisions.
And after spending all that time in April’s supposedly perfect neighborhood, I’ve learned something else:
I don’t think I want to live there.
I’ll take a boring neighborhood where nobody is murdering the secretary, blackmailing the neighbors, or trying to kill their own daughter, thank you very much.
Final Recommendation
I’d recommend Want to Know a Secret? to readers who enjoy fast psychological thrillers, unreliable narrators, suburban secrets, morally questionable characters, and twists that keep changing what you think you know.
If you’re already a Freida McFadden fan, this is an easy book to fly through. It may not rank at the very top of my Freida favorites, but it was still a really fun read—and apparently fun enough that I couldn’t put it down for more than two days.