Book #69: Every Secret Thing

Title: Every Secret Thing


Author: Lila Shaara


Every Secret Thing was one of those books I grabbed while being dragged from the library entrance, past the new book section, into the children's section. And although I really liked the main character, Gina Paletta, a NYC model turned college professor at a small upstate NY liberal arts college, I must say that I didn't really "get" the whole conflict of the story. At the beginning of the novel, Paletta is told that one of her students, who is under suspicion for killing a classmate, has created a website in which he writes about his obsession for her. In order to protect her and her two children, two NYC detectives move in with her. She (rather predictably but sweetly) falls in love with one of the detectives, who ends up getting injured twice while trying to save her. At the end of the novel we discover that the student really was a crazy bad guy, but someone else was also obsessed with her and trying to get rid of the cops. I think the crime side of the novel was pretty weak-- I don't understand why having an obsessed student would warrant her that kind of protection, and sometimes it was unclear to me which of the unrelated bad guys was doing which bad things to the people close to her and why. But, call me sappy, I did enjoy the romantic side to the story.


--originally published 10/10/06