A review by notesbynnenna
All Her Little Secrets by Wanda M. Morris

4.0

Thank you to the publisher for giving me a free copy of this book! All opinions are my own.

I really enjoyed this debut thriller! I feel like only a small portion of the mystery/thrillers I’ve read have been written by Black authors, so when @zakiyadalilaharris told me about this one, I immediately put it on my list. 

When Ellice discovers her white boss (who she was having an affair with) dead in his office, she panics and leaves him there for someone else to find. She’s running from a dark past and is afraid that all her secrets will come to light, and her carefully crafted life will dissolve into shambles. But after that day, her life will never be the same and she starts to realize that maybe she can’t outrun her past forever.

I thought Ellice was a great character. She definitely has her flaws, which makes her feel very human, but she’s also smart and capable. Ellice is often the only Black person in the room and she deals with both racism and sexism: microaggressions, coded language, and outright threats. From the beginning, I was highly suspicious of the situation and I had a feeling that bad things were going to happen (I mean, duh, it’s a thriller, but I could really feel that little pit of dread in my stomach).

Maybe it was a little slow in terms of pacing in the first half, but then I felt like I absolutely raced through the second half. I was intrigued and engaged by the story the whole way through and I think I was holding my breath towards the end! The chapters are relatively short, particularly the flashbacks to her past. I really wanted to know what happened in her past and what she was running away from.

Some truly wild and difficult things happen in this book, so definitely check out trigger warnings before reading if needed. If you’re looking for an engaging and tense thriller that you won’t want to put down, I would recommend this one.