Secrets Never Die by Vincent Ralph

The quick cut: A group of friends find their lives turned upside down when their secret Halloween ritual is discovered and exposed by a mysterious enemy torturing them. 

A real review:

 Thank you to Wednesday Books for providing the arc for an honest review. 

 Secrets can eat you from the inside out, especially when they are dark or feel important to hide. They have a way of turning your good relationships to bad and putting an unexplainable distance between you and others. For Sam and his friends, it makes their secrets feel inhumanly large when a mysterious enemy finds out and uses them. 

 Every year on Halloween, Sam and his friends go to a hut called the dark place and one by one let go of their biggest secrets, letting the wind take them away. When a mystery stranger starts messaging each of them and exposing that they know their secrets, each one wonders who is blackmailing them and why. Will they figure out the truth? Or will it be too much to handle? 

 I've read the authors previous books before and enjoyed them, so seeing another one of his stories interested me. I love thriller and horror stories, so I was excited to see where it went. Overall, I do feel like the stakes were too low to justify the plot. 

 Sam is a kid who was a child actor who left the profession in a shocking way. He's got secrets in his past, but I expected them to be more significant. His friends also don't have these types of secrets that would cause this type of intense response. 

 That's the aspect of this book that feels too unbelievable. Even once the full plot and reason behind what's happening is revealed, it feels very much like an overreaction. The connections are twisty to the point of being unnecessarily complex.

 I like the surprise plot reveal, but I also like it to be believable or based in reality. The final solution feels too fantasy based that way. It needed true stakes worthy of that devious a reaction. The characters are likeable, but the plot could've used more finesse. 

A horror story with an unbelievable plot. 

My rating: 3.5 out of 5