A review by sleepysamreads
Keep This to Yourself by Tom Ryan

4.0

You can find this review and others on my blog SleepySamReads!

Special thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoy these type of thriller books, but they rarely take me by surprise. I almost always figure out the big twist or who the bad guy is. This book is extremely unique for me because it caught me completely off guard. I thought I was figuring everything out like always, but then the twist happened and blindsided me. I LOVED that. It doesn't happen nearly enough.

Keep This to Yourself is set in a coastal town in Oregon, which was honestly the perfect setting.

I loved the characters a lot. Mac, the main character, has lost his best friend a year before the story starts and you can still see how he's grieving and having a hard time moving on. I also like how Mac is gay, which I enjoyed because there's so few thriller books with a gay protagonist. Now if I could find one with a lesbian protagonist, we'd be set.

I thought that Mac and Quill's relationship was cute, though I wish we would have gotten to see more of it after Conner's murder was resolved. I feel like their relationship was based on their mutual interest in investigating Conner's murder and I wonder if they have anything in common other than that.

The only thing I didn't super love was the very ending. It was not believable at all and requires a suspension of disbelief that I just couldn't handle. I can do that with fantasy type novels, but with novels like this that are set in the 'actual' world, it's hard.

I really enjoyed Keep This to Yourself, even if the ending wasn't completely satisfactory.