A Secret to Die For? Maybe Not

Our most recent read here at Better Read than Dead was A Secret To Die For by Lisa Harris. It’s expected to be released September 18, 2018. Here’s a short description of the book from Amazon.

Psychologist Grace Callahan has no idea that she has a secret--one worth killing for. But when she finds out one of her clients has been murdered, she quickly realizes that the computer security specialist wasn't simply suffering from paranoia.

Detective Nate Quinn has just been cleared for active duty after a bombing killed eighteen people, including his partner, and left him dealing with PTSD. His first case back on the job involves the murder of Stephen Shaw, and his only lead turns out to be an old friend, Grace Callahan--and her life is in grave danger. Someone believes Shaw gave his psychologist information before he died. Information they are willing to kill for.

Strap in folks, it’s time to spill the tea.

This novel reads like an episode of Criminal Minds, or any cop show really. By that we mean that if you watch enough of them, it kinda seems like it’s the same episode over and over again with slightly different characters and situations.

This book felt done before, it wasn’t new and groundbreaking. It’s kinda just the same old cop story we’ve heard a million times. That also lends the story to being predictable.

As someone who has seen every episode of Criminal Minds, Addie was able to call this one before the book ended, and was right.

As Sherlock said, “Bitterness is a paralytic, love is a much more vicious motivator.” Weighing each characters possible motives, it was clear who our perpetrator had to be.

^ Us at the end of this book.

Another thing that kind of grinded our gears about this book was that it was really pushy, religiously speaking. Every situation was like ‘Well I guess all we can do is pray for a miracle instead of using our skills and letting the cops do their jobs’. Religious characters were praised while non-religious ones were criticized. Faith was brought up every five seconds it felt like. We are not dogging faith or religion, we both went to Catholic schools, but it seemed like A LOT coming from a murder mystery cop thriller.

This book took us a while to get through, which was surprising considering its basic language and vocabulary. There was nothing that just kept snatching us back to it.

This book was fine,

we enjoyed it, but it took so long to get to the point. We felt like the first 200 pages were just background, then we finally build to the endgame in the last few chapters. If we weren’t reviewing it, we would have dropped it early on. We needed something more to keep us invested.

We will say that we like how the author attempted to contemporize the story with the threat being in the fieldhouse of cyber crimes. And there was a touch of romance with a happy ending.

If you like cop shows, you’ll probably like this book. But expect what you expect out of those shows. And we’re talking low budget B-movie level ‘thriller’. Thriller is even pushing it, so is ‘action’.

We are going to go watch an episode of Sherlock now to cleanse our palates and remind ourselves of what a good murder mystery feels like, because this secret was certainly not worth dying for.

Better Read than Dead,

Addie & Geneva

In exchange for a fair and impartial review we were provided with an advanced reading copy of A Secret to Die For by Baker Publishing Group.

Like what you see? Subscribe and never miss a post. It’s easy, free, and we won’t bombard you with emails!

Have you read any of the books we’ve reviewed? Do you have a book recommendation for us? We now have a forum for that! It’s free and an easy way to join the conversation with fellow members of the Better Read than Dead Book Club! Just hit the button that says “Forum” at the top of the page! All you need is an email to sign up!