The Secrets She Keeps by Michael Robotham

We’ll have to wait to the end to know if Agatha is the living embodiment of the politics of envy or just a very naughty girl.Bonus Audio Content: Includes chapter one of Michael Robotham’s 2019 thriller GOOD GIRL, BAD GIRL! If that’s all too colour-by-numbers, you could add a layer of class critique, beginning with working-class Agatha’s signature anorak and desultory apartment. There has been a pleasing proportion of skeletons to closets as the tale dutifully peels away layers to reveal more layers (because underneath it all, we’re thoroughly miserable, aren’t we ladies?). The Secrets She Keeps has given audiences a decent twirl around the dance floor while it probes the secrets and lies of performative contentment.

Of course, the related question, jumping up and down in the corner and screaming for attention, is who is going to come out of this little potboiler alive? For what it’s worth, Meghan’s husband Jack (Michael Dorman) is utterly expendable but could redeem his disappointing ordinariness with a heroic act of noble sacrifice. What we wait for now is the fleshing out of Agatha: what baby Ben signifies to her and to what extremes she will go to keep him. Her wide-eyed adoration of Meghan on encountering her for the first time in the supermarket aisle was a ring-a-ding moment, the leap from “we’re both pregnant” to “let’s be friends!” a quasi-parody of the formation of female friendships. It was clear from the outset that Agatha was Not Good News. As any self-respecting thriller fan knows, such a woman is in the holding pen for the sheep drench of comeuppance. The perfection of Meghan Shaughnessy (Jessica De Gouw) is measured in the most traditional of ways: her alabaster skin and artful bun, her mummy blogger semi-celebrity, her fancy house with entertainer’s deck, her handsome husband, her 2.7 children. We have a main protagonist, blissfully unaware at the start of the six-part series that her conventionally lovely life is about to unravel. An urban gothic tale – “domestic noir” is the commonly cited description – it doesn’t exactly play its cards close to its chest. The breathily sung tune is at once familiar yet unsettling, which hits the sweet spot for the genre that has overtaken general fiction at the top of the bestseller lists.īefitting a title that could have been the result of a thriller name algorithm, The Secrets She Keeps honours the tropes of the genre.

The dreamy cover version of Kylie’s 2001 earworm Can’t Get You Out of My Head is the perfect aural accompaniment for this adaptation of Michael Robotham’s bestselling thriller, originally based in the UK and transplanted to Sydney.

The Secrets She Keeps by Michael Robotham