The Secrets of Us by Lucinda Berry

​like all berries. Blueberry, strawberry, Flynn Berry. It stood to reason this one would be tasty too and sure enough…it actually was. Not mind blowingly, amazingly, this berry above all berries so, but pretty good all the same.
The author used her background as a psychologist to craft an intriguing, dark, very dark, psychological thriller about two closer than blood sisters whose past reaches out and grabs them into a stranglehold years later.
Krystal and Nichole as their names so amply scream, came up from a white trash past and went through foster care together, inseparable, to emerge as well to do, well adjusted adults. Or so it was to all outward appearances, until Nichole went seemingly out of nowhere wildly and dangerously insane, burned down her place with her beloved Aiden in it and danced on the ashes.
Now Aiden is charred and bewildered, Nichole is in a straitjacket heavily sedated and Krystal, the sane, calm, reasonable Krystal, is left to figure out what the pluck is going on.
In a parallel narrative done by Nichole, the readers are taken back to the girls’ last years in foster care, a Cinderella like situation with a mean spirited strict woman who essentially uses them as farm labor and her equally mean spirited daughter. Tragedy occurs and the girls do their best to put it behind. But the thing with psyches (as the author has such a profound professional understanding of) is that they are wildly ununiform, especially when it comes to trauma processing, and what works for one person may kill another.
The very thing Krystal and Nichole find out all those years later, in the present day narrative.
Not quite Crime and Punishment, but a very credible take on the crippling effects of guilty conscience in this dynamic suspense thriller. Very decent plot twists for genre lovers. Fans of dark psychological (with the emphasis on psychological) fiction ought to be pleased. And, of course, entertained. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.