Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Lindsay Cameron’s No One Needs To Know, which is out May 9th.

It was all confidential. Right up to the moment when it wasn’t.

UrbanMyth: It was lauded as an alternative to the performative, show-your-best-self platforms—an anonymous discussion board grouped by zip code. The residents of Manhattan’s exclusive Upper East Side disclosed it all, things they would never share with their friends or their spouses: secret bank accounts, steamy affairs, tidbits of juicy gossip. These are the same parents who would go to astonishing lengths to ensure their children gain admission to the most prestigious boarding schools and universities. So when a “hacktivist” group breaks into the forum and exposes the real identity behind each poster, the repercussions resound down Park Avenue with a force none could have anticipated.

And someone will end up dead.

Will it be Heather, the outsider who would do anything to get her daughter into the elite’s good graces and into even better schools? Norah, the high-powered suit failing to balance work and the emotional responsibilities of motherhood? Or Poppy, perfect on the outside but hiding more than her share of secrets?

Each of them has something to hide. Each of them will do anything to keep their secrets hidden. And each of them just might kill to protect their own.

Chapter One
February
Heather

As the black Escalade inched down Park Avenue, Heather had the feeling she was being slowly marched off a cliff. She imagined a loud, male voice behind her bellowing out the orders—left, right, left, right—until she plunged blindly over the edge. Was it her husband’s voice she was hearing in her mind or some generic movie voice, like Morgan Freeman’s? It had to be the latter. If her husband had his way, she wouldn’t be sitting in this car right now. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Oliver had repeated, as she’d pushed her feet into the ballet flats beside the door, his brow crinkled with concern.

Yes, she was sure.

So why wouldn’t Morgan Freeman shut the hell up?

Heather leaned her head between the seats, peering out the windshield at the river of illuminated red taillights. A mocking reminder of how little control she had over the evening.

“Can you take Lexington instead? This doesn’t look like it’s moving.” If she was going to be marched off a cliff, it should at least be efficient.

The driver tapped the dirty iPhone mounted on the dashboard. “Waze says Park is better, but whatever you say.” The car swung left and she slid back on the seat. She could already see the traffic was lighter on Lex. The knot in her stomach uncoiled a bit.

A good omen—she could use one of those.

She put her hand on her daughter’s arm and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “It’ll be more fun than you think. I promise.”

“You and I have very different definitions of fun,” Violet muttered, not bothering to raise her eyes from her phone.

Heather’s jaw clenched. There were kids right now who were weeping to their parents because they couldn’t get a ticket to this event, yet here her daughter sat, acting like she was about to spend the evening being waterboarded.

The driver jammed his brakes at the light, and an expensively clad woman holding the hand of a curly haired toddler stepped off the curb, lifting up an open palm to the cars, as if she had the power to stop traffic. Heather followed them with her eyes, feeling a pinch of nostalgia for when Violet was that age. Always at arm’s reach. How easy it was to guide her through life back then. Organic food, music classes to stimulate her brain, teaching her to go down a slide rather than walk up it—there was a playbook, a comprehensive step-by-step guide that made perfect sense to Heather. “It’s easy to feel like a good parent when you have an easy child,” the director of Violet’s preschool had told a roomful of eager parents, but Heather wholeheartedly disagreed. It wasn’t genetic luck. Heather had prepared for being a mother the same way she’d prepared for the SATs—meticulously. And it had paid off. Violet could read an entire chapter book before she’d finished kindergarten, had a shelf full of squash trophies, and was a regular winner of the service award at her competitive Upper East Side private school. This type of success didn’t happen by accident. Heather was a good mother.

Violet was proof of concept.

She tucked a stray strand of Violet’s cinnamon-colored hair behind her ear. “I know this isn’t what you want to be doing tonight, but you need to keep your eye on the prize.”

Violet groaned. “You don’t even know if she’ll be there, Mom. I mean, where did you even hear she was coming? You said yourself it wasn’t public knowledge.” Violet tore at a cuticle with her teeth, and Heather gently moved her hand away from her mouth. Violet looked like she might protest, but she let her hand fall into her lap.

“Eye on the prize,” Heather repeated, ignoring the question. Again.

“Whatever,” Violet mumbled, plucking a peppermint candy from the pile in the cup holder, twisting open the wrapper, and popping it into her mouth before Heather could protest. Heather pressed her lips together. She hated when Violet ate anything offered in an Uber. Who knew where those dirty little candies had been? Some pervert might find it humorous to unwrap them, lick, and rewrap, waiting for some unsuspecting rider to partake. Why wasn’t her daughter more suspicious of candy from strangers? A suburban, poison-in-Halloween-candy-style paranoia had been drilled into Heather as a child, but she’d somehow failed to pass on a healthy sense of caution to her daughter. She added that to her mental list of things to teach Violet. But not tonight.

Heather checked the time on her phone. 6:55 p.m. Dammit.

“We’ll get out here,” she said, tapping a fingernail against the window.

“We’re still five blocks away,” Violet whined as she unpeeled herself from the leather bucket seat. “And these shoes you made me wear are really uncomfortable.” She gestured to her sensible but fashionable one-inch-heeled pumps, the ones Heather had purchased last week after reading a study claiming people attribute significantly greater intelligence to taller children. While it might not be a fair assessment, who was she to argue with psychology?

“You’ll be fine.” Heather waved her out of the car impatiently. “The walk will be good for both of us.”

By the time they swept through the brass doors and into the elegant foyer, most of the children had already descended the scarlet carpeted staircase. They weren’t children anymore, Heather supposed. They were teenagers now, all dressed up and ready for their first Teen Night at The Doubles Club, the private dining club that catered to the elite social set, which Heather had spent years strategizing her way into. “It’s so overwhelming, isn’t it?” Heather could remember a perky southern blonde lamenting as she shook a small maraca over her three-month-old in their Music Babies class at Diller-Quaile. “New York City parenting, I mean. Like, we have to do all these classes to get them into the right preschools and we have to know about all this stuff, like, years in advance or our child is shut out. And apparently it only gets worse.” She’d leaned in conspiratorially. “Have you heard about these teen dances at Doubles? My neighbor told me her daughter became a social pariah because they weren’t members, so she couldn’t go.” Heather had arranged her expression to be appropriately shocked, but she’d gone home and straight to Google to investigate. Unlike her southern friend, Heather didn’t consider it overwhelming. There was a formula. Formulas she understood.

A gaggle of girls congregated at the bottom of the stairs now, teetering like newborn giraffes in heels that were much too high, visibly vibrating with excitement. Heather scanned the preening crowd, hoping for a familiar face she could point Violet toward—a social crutch—but came up empty.

Violet needed to make more friends. Although, truth be told, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree in that category.

“Place your mobile phones in these locked pouches,” a goateed man in a dark suit bellowed to the group making their way inside, tendering a brown pouch to each outstretched hand. “They’ll be returned to you at the end of the night.”

Heather’s fingers curled tighter around the strap of her purse. The first time she’d encountered these “privacy pouches” was at the latest Lin-Manuel Miranda musical, when ushers had informed the patrons that they were required to stow their mobile devices until the final curtain. “It’s for your own enjoyment,” the usher had explained, as he’d passed her a Playbill and a numbered pouch. But everyone knew the pouches were less about altruism and more about preventing an opportunistic fan from filming the show and plastering it online for all to see. It made sense for private clubs across the city to employ the same approach to “protect the integrity and privacy of the members of the club,” as the president of The Doubles Club put it in a letter to its members. After Occupy Wall Street, these old-school, old-money clubs were vilified and all it would take was one unfortunate video posted online and the media would be all over it. Heather had purposely not mentioned this new rule to Violet, though, treating it as a “cross that bridge” problem.

“Wait.” Violet stopped short at the top of the stairway, the sole of her new shoes scuffing across the floor. Her eyes widened in horror. “What did he say?” She hugged her phone to her chest, as if it were a favorite teddy bear about to be ripped from her grasp.

Heather let out a weary sigh. “Don’t be so dramatic, Vi. It’s only two hours. I’ll pick you up at nine, you’ll have your phone back, and you can tell me all about the fun you’ve had.”

Violet gave her another eye roll and Heather noticed a fleck of mascara on her lid. Heather had broken her moratorium on eye makeup, hoping a few swipes of mascara would give Violet a booster shot of confidence, but looking at her lashes now she wondered if it was a bit much.

This isn’t New Jersey.

Excerpted from No One Needs to Know by Lindsay Cameron. Copyright © 2023 by Lindsay Cameron. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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We Were Never Here by Andrea Bartz
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An annual backpacking trip has deadly consequences in a chilling new novel from the bestselling author of The Lost Night and The Herd.

Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung
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Buoyant, heartbreaking, and unexpectedly funny, Ghost Forest is a slim novel that envelops the reader in joy and sorrow. Fung writes with a poetic and haunting voice, layering detail and abstraction, weaving memory and oral history to paint a moving portrait of a Chinese-Canadian astronaut family.

Just One Look by Lindsay Cameron
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A young woman’s escalating obsession with a seemingly perfect man leads her down a dangerous path in this novel of suspense brimming with envy, desire, and deception.

The Tiger Mom’s Tale by Lyn Liao Butler
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When an American woman inherits the wealth of her Taiwanese family, she travels to confront them about their betrayals of the past in this stunning debut by Lyn Liao Butler.

The Forest of Vanishing Stars by Kristin Harmel
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The New York Times bestselling author of the The Book of Lost Names returns with an evocative coming-of-age World War II story about a young woman who uses her knowledge of the wilderness to help Jewish refugees escape the Nazis—until a secret from her past threatens everything.

Kill All Your Darlings by David Bell
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When a student disappears and is presumed dead, her professor passes off her manuscript as his own–only to find out it implicates him in an unsolved murder in this new thriller from the USA Today bestselling author of The Request.

The View Was Exhausting by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta
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The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig
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Her Last Breath by Hilary Davidson
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Radar Girls by Sara Ackerman
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Not a Happy Family by Shari Lapena
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No More Words by Kerry Lonsdale
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The post July 2021 Fiction Book Releases appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

We chat with author Lindsay Cameron about her new release Just One Look, along with writing, book recommendations, and more!

Hi, Lindsay! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?

Hi! Thanks for having me. I’m a former corporate lawyer turned writer, which means I’ve spent a lot of time in front of a laptop. I was raised in Vancouver, but now live in New York City with my husband and two children. We make a pilgrimage back to British Columbia every summer to visit family and friends and to make sure our children know how to skip rocks and explore the forest. Just One Look is my suspense debut and I’m so excited for it to be out in the world!

Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!

Great question! The first book I remember reading is Charlotte’s Web (which is also the first book that made me cry!) There isn’t one particular book made me want to become an author, but Steven King’s memoir On Writing gave me a lot of valuable insight into the craft. There are so many books that linger in my mind that I can’t stop thinking about, but if I need to pick one it would be The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. The story haunts me, in a good way.

When did you first discover your love for writing?

I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t love writing! As a child I was always scribbling in my diary (making my day sound far more dramatic than it was), dreaming up my latest short story, or writing my own Babysitters Club fan fiction. But believing I could turn my love of writing into a career came much later!

Your latest novel, Just One Look, is out July 27^th 2021! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?

suspenseful, envy, obsession, emails, deception

What can readers expect?

Just One Look follows the story of a young lawyer named Cassie who becomes infatuated with a seemingly perfect partner at the firm after stumbling upon private email exchanges between him and his wife while reviewing correspondence for a case. Cassie knows she shouldn’t read the emails, but she can’t help herself. What begins as a bit of snooping escalates into a dangerous obsession when Cassie devises a plan to take his wife’s place.

Readers can expect to feel a sudden need to change all of their passwords after they finish the book!

Where did the inspiration for Just One Look come from?

The seed for this story was planted in my mind years ago when I was working as a lawyer at a large firm in New York. There was a group of temps reviewing archived emails for a lawsuit involving one of the firm’s clients and, as the result of the result of a glitch, entire inboxes of multiple lawyers were mistakenly included in the review folders. After the error was discovered, the rumor mill churned as to whose emails had been read, what was written, and what the fallout would be. The anxiety that filled the air of the hallways was thick and it struck me that the fear of someone accessing your inbox was probably up there with someone breaking into your home. Our inboxes can contain an entire blueprint of our lives. And, because I love a good thriller, I started to wonder what would happen if that blueprint fell into the wrong hands.

Can you tell us about any challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?

I was working on an edit of this novel in March 2020 when the world was plunged into lockdown, so that was especially challenging. In between doom scrolling and wiping down my groceries, I suddenly found myself without childcare and supervising virtual learning. In order to get anything creative accomplished, I forced myself to turn off CNN and worked out a schedule with my husband where I could lock myself in my bedroom without any distractions. When I could lose myself in my manuscript again, it turned out to be a welcome diversion.

Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?

I loved writing Cassie’s interactions with Ricky because he added a little comic relief to the story and I could see him so clearly in my head. His role in the novel actually grew because I enjoyed writing his character so much! He was based on a combination of different people I’ve worked with in the past (with a little artistic license thrown in…), but I think we’ve all worked with someone like Ricky at some point. He’s universal!

What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?

Best: You can’t edit a blank page. I’ll often repeat this in my mind on the days when I’m feeling stuck as a reminder that the first draft is just that – a draft. The magic can happen in the edit.

Worst: Write every day. I think it sets up unrealistic expectations. I know it works for a lot of people, but it’s too much pressure for me. Write when you can!

What’s next for you?

I’m working on my next novel which will also be suspense, but I’m too superstitious to give more details than that until it’s finished! I’ve always been pretty hush hush on any work in progress.

Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for our readers?

I sure do! For your beach bag: The Husbands by Chandler Baker. Everyone needs to read this one because I want to talk about it with someone! For a pulse pounding thriller: Woman on the Edge by Samantha Bailey, Bath Haus by PJ Vernon, The Wife Stalker by Liv Constantine and The Hunting Wives by May Cobb. For suspense you’ll want to read in one sitting: The Perfect Guests by Emma Rous, The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Herd by Andrea Bartz, For Your Own Good by Samantha Downing, and You Love Me by Caroline Kepnes.

Will you be picking up Just One Look? Tell us in the comments below!

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