She Was the Quiet One by Michele Campbell #michelecampbell #stmartinspress #siblingrivalry #twins #suspense @absltmom

If you have grown up with siblings, you are probably acutely aware of the rivalry that oftentimes occurs in a family. There is always that competition, be it for parent’s accolades, a school’s praise, or even being judged on attractiveness. It crops up in one’s daily life that look for and need for acceptance, for love, for knowing out of all the rest, you are the best. Such was the need for twins Rose and Bel Enright in the book Having read and enjoyed Ms Campbell’s other book It’s Always the Husband, I was looking forward to a exciting read.

Bel and Rose Enright are twins, but that was probably where the similarities end. They are both totally at different ends of the spectrum and when the girls are sent to an exclusive boarding school by am aloof grandparent, trouble is on the horizon. Bel finds herself caught up in the “it” girls group at school. They are callous, insensitive, and totally focused on themselves. Yet, they are the ones who think themselves as exceptional, the darlings of the school, the risk takers, the ones all others aspire to be and Bel is to become one of them.

Poor Rose, she is indeed the quiet one, the one where school is important, where she longs to be popular yet, knows she will never be. She is the loner, the forgotten one, the one so looking for acceptance for her place in the sun.

Then there is Sarah, the wife of a very ambitious man, mother of two children, who is about to have her world turned upside down as she slowly discovers the dark underbelly of the school she and her husband are such a part of. Who is the man she married and how are situations at school spiraling out of control and resulting in the ultimate horror they are now experiencing?

This book again points out that we really so often do not know the people who are the closest to us. Do we ever really know another, and what if that other is the one we married or the one who we shared our mother’s body with for nine months? Is deception part of our DNA?

This book was a quick read, one possessing quite a few twists with an ending that held quite a surprise. It was somewhat predictable, but easily one that held this reader’s interest. This was surely a novel where “The only quiet woman is a dead one.” (Sylvia Platt) Recommended to those who liked a book possessing artifice and intrigue.

Michele Campbell is a graduate of Harvard College and Stanford Law School and a former federal prosecutor in New York City who specialized in international narcotics and gang cases.

A while back, she said goodbye to her big-city legal career and moved with her husband and two children to an idyllic New England college town a lot like Belle River in IT’S ALWAYS THE HUSBAND. Since then, she has spent her time teaching criminal and constitutional law and writing novels.

She has had many close female friends, a few frenemies, and only one husband, who – to the best of her knowledge – has never tried to kill her.