"The Teacher’s Secret” by Lauren North proved to be a solid 4-star read. When Cate and her son Archie fail to return home one Friday afternoon, the community rallies around Oliver, her husband and father, to comfort and support him. However, as suspicions arise about Oliver's true nature, it becomes uncertain who the community is truly helping.

The story unfolds through the perspectives of four main characters: Oliver, the grieving husband and father; Lexi, the substitute teacher; Jeanie, the vigilant neighbor; and Gemma, another teacher from the school. All four of them lie to the police to hide their secrets. While some aspects may have pushed boundaries, overall, I found the story intriguing. Lexi exhibits drastic swings between confidence and being frozen with fear. The ending was satisfying, and all the secrets were revealed.

Thanks to Bookouture, Lauren North, and NetGalley for providing me with the opportunity to read this ARC and share my honest review.

Prepare yourself for a story that’s full of twists right until the end. True to form, this small community is filled to the brim with suspicious characters, dark secrets, and plenty of lies. North has skill fully written a suspenseful thriller with multiple POVs.
From the onset, The Teacher’s Secret was absorbing and addictive. A binge able read, the novel has lots of things to discover and uncover, which keeps the reader hooked.

Emma Woods does a superb job with the narration. She tactfully moves from each characters POV.
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Thank you to Lauren North and @netgalley for the ARC in exchange for my review.

Thank you NetGalley for allowing me to read this excellent book! The mystery was well paced and thought out with an absolutely out of pocket hook.

If you liked: The Teacher

3.5 stars. Nice entertaining story.

The ending was my favorite part. I felt that the book was a little too drawn out and perhaps would have been better written in third person as I felt frustrated that I was supposedly in the characters’ minds but they wouldn’t tell me what on earth was going on.

While parts of this novel worked well for me, I did feel the story fell into a bit of a formulaic pattern and I didn't enjoy the narration as much as I proabably would have enjoyed reading it as a digital or print book. Overall, that didnt take too much away from the story, but it didn't give me as mmuch as I had hopes for.

Thank you to the publisher, author and NetGalley for the ARC.

What a brilliant book! The Teacher’s Secret begins with the disappearance of teacher Cate and her son Archie. Headteacher and husband, Oliver, is behaving very suspiciously - as well as many others in the town. We meet substitute teacher Lexi, who has her own secrets to hide and reasons for preferring to be a sub and move around rather than settle in one place… Full of interesting twists - whilst it’s fun to figure out what’s happening and you may feel you have some elements worked out, there are a lot of surprises and switches too! Really enjoyable read