Secrets by Meg Gardiner

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Everybody has something to hide. We each have something we don't want the world to know. This means secrets have power. And that power gives forbidden knowledge its overwhelming allure.

In The Dirty Secrets Club, a group of A-list San Franciscans plays hide and seek with the secrets in their pasts. The game is risky but exciting, until they start dying and taking others with them.

Forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett, consultant to the SFPD, must figure out why murder-suicide has become a grisly game. She learns that the dead all belonged to the Dirty Secrets Club, a shadowy clique that's playing truth or dare with some crazy secrets.

The Dirty Secrets Club is a virtual confessional where members reveal their wildest doings. It's part ego-trip, part strip-club of the conscience, part game. And it's exclusive: you have to apply to join, and you won't be admitted unless you're a power player with something shocking in your past. The club is for thrillseekers who want to play Russian roulette with their status and their freedom.

Where did the idea come from?

From human nature. People love secrets. Secrets can be horrible, fun, or deadly. Most of all, they can be valuable. But only as long as they stay secret.

Plenty of people, however, love telling secrets. Look at postsecret.com. People send in postcards revealing their secrets, and the site has had 146 million hits. Look at the Jerry Springer Show: Public confession is the rage. Guests actually fight to get famous by blabbing the nasty truth. But the things people disclose are cheap and sleazy. Spilling your secret on trash TV ruins both the secret and your reputation. It destroys your power.

The Dirty Secrets Club knows that people can confess in private. You can talk confidentially to a psychiatrist or a lawyer, without fear of exposure or reprisal. You can confess to a priest, and he'll never tell, under pain of death.

But club members don't want penance or absolution. They want to have their cake and eat it too: They want to brag about how they've stepped over the line, but also to control who gets to know about their misdeeds. They want the club to marvel at their transgressions and at the stunts they're daring each other to carry out. Because when you confess, it's validation, it's telling people, I've done something amazing.

But by the time Jo Beckett comes on the scene, there aren't any more thrills - just wreckage. A flamboyant fashion designer burns to death on his yacht, clutching the body of his murdered lover. A U.S. Attorney has crashes her BMW off an overpass, killing herself and three others. Something has gone very wrong with the club.

Why are people dying? Jo has to find out, before more A-listers go down and take innocent bystanders with them.

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Meg Gardiner, The Dirty Secrets Club, San Francisco, murder, Jo Beckett, forensic psychiatrist, Stephen King, thriller, Penguin Books, books