Whitcoulls Recommends: The Secrets We Hide and Blood Will Flow

The Secrets We Hide by Karin Slaughter. This is the second in her North Falls series, set in a small town after the shooting of a woman and her daughter and the subsequent investigation carried out by the local sheriff, which uncovers secrets and lies aplenty. It’s a classic small town where everybody knows everybody else, but don’t necessarily see them as they really are. Very cleverly constructed and a terrific addition to Karin Slaughter’s extensive body of thrillers.

Blood Will Flow by Alex Perry.  Some years ago, an enormous gas field was discovered in Mozambique, after which the wealthy foreign companies arrived and started to export the gas, benefiting themselves and the West, but leaving the local people no better off. The French company TotalEnergies managed an enormous operation there, paying lip service to the notion of adequate security and when a rebel ISIS group arrived and carried out a vicious attack, help was not forthcoming. The book is populated with oil magnates, corporate greed, mercenaries and billionaires and is a strong indictment of an industry completely lacking a moral compass. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks EDB.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Joining me now is Joe McKenzie, headbook Bar at Wickles.
Good morning. Hello. I'm very excited to see there's another
Karen Slaughter available. I do love her.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
Yeah, she's quite remarkable. She's got an amazing body of work.
And the thing about her books is that they're quite detailed.
I'm not going to say complex because that sounds a
bit off putting, but actually she does really detailed.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Plots and good reason.

Speaker 3 (00:34):
It draws all the characters together really well. Yeah. This
is the second in a series that she's called North Falls.
It's called The Secrets We Hide and North Falls is
a small town in America, and the first book in
the series was called We Are All Guilty Here. But
like all good authors, you don't necessarily need to have
read the first one to be able to appreciate the second,
but if you have, it just gives you a bit

(00:56):
more background. And in both books, Emmy Clifton is one
of the lead characters, and in this new book she's
the town sheriff and the Clifton family seem to own
nor Falls. Her dad was the sheriff before her, and
then she took it on after he died, and her
young and I would say largely gormless son is now
her deputy. So there's a healthy dose of nepotism going

(01:17):
on in the sheriff's department in this town. Her mom
dies and on the way to the wake after the funeral,
they hear gunshots and they turn up at a crime
scene where a local woman and her daughter have both
been shot. So Emmy never makes it to her mum's wake.
She instead starts unraveling a really sad story of domestic
abuse and trauma and figuring out who was responsible for

(01:39):
this shooting. There's a very interesting character in this book
who is her much older sister called Jude, who's an
FBI legend, and of course she's there for the funeral,
so she gets caught up helping out with this investigation,
so you know, even more nepotism. The family's all involved.
Like all good small towns, the place is rife with
secrets and lies. Everyone knows everybody else and all their business.

(02:04):
But there are several things in this book that you
never see coming, including the secret that sits right at
the heart of these two sisters, and it's just brilliantly
put together. I would actually read anything that Karen Slaughter wrote.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
I'm really interested to hear about this book by Alex Perry,
this nonfiction book Blood Will Flow. This sounds like a
fascinating story.

Speaker 3 (02:23):
It is, and you know that I'm a real sucker
for really good quality investigative journalism. This is quite remarkable.
Some years ago in Mozambique, an enormous gas field was discovered,
and after that, of course, the wealthy foreign company started
turning up and exporting the gas, which benefited them and
the rest of their western friends, but it left all

(02:43):
the local people know better off. And this book is
a terrible and largely unknown story of an event which
is apparently the second worst terrorist attack of all time
after nine to eleven, and no one's ever heard about it.
Back in twenty twenty one, the French company Total Energies
managed an enormous operation in this part, this northern part

(03:05):
of Mozambique, and they the head of Total was and
I think probably still is, a real egomaniac. He's a
Frenchman who rules the company as if it's his own
personal kingdom, with absolutely no regard for the welfare or
the well being of the people of the countries where
they operate, and it was known that there were rebel
gangs in the area, and he paid lip service to

(03:27):
the notion of adequate security. So when an ISIS group
arrived and carried out a really vicious attack, no one
came to help them, despite the fact there was a
military base nearby with one thousand soldiers based there, and
there was a corporate security operation operated by Total which
could and should have intervened. And almost twelve hundred people

(03:48):
were murdered, a couple of hundred were abducted, and many
others were injured. And this all only came to light
because the author, who's a UK based journalist, heard about
it and he spent some time there and couldn't get
any official information. So he put a small team of
people together and they they went back and conducted interviews
with all of the survivors and they were able to

(04:10):
produce a record of exactly what happened and give a
final tally for Compass.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
Okay, I can't wait to pick that up now. Blood
will flow. The book we've just been talking about. It's
not going to be in the South Island stores until
next week. Yeah, probably Monday. Okay. That book was Blood
Will Flow by Alex Perry. The first book was The
Secrets We Hired by Karen Slaughter and Joan. School holidays
are here and it's time for the kids to start
voting for the kids Top fifty.

Speaker 3 (04:35):
Yes, every year What Cause produces a new Kid's Top
fifty list and we would love kids during the school
holidays to get out their pen and paper or their
fingers on the keyboard and vote for their favorite books.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
So that is the Kid's Top fifty. Voting is open.
You can do it in store or online. Thanks so much, Joan.

Speaker 3 (04:54):
See you next week.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks there'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.