You know what's worse than a haunted house? A haunted house story where the protagonist makes you want to scream - and not in the fun way.
I came to Secrets and Lies during a late shift at the library, shelving returns in the back stacks where the fluorescent lights flicker just enough to make you paranoid. Perfect setup for a "couple moves to creepy village" thriller, right? The bones are there: Flora and Adam McIntosh relocate to the countryside, Flora starts sensing something wrong with the house, the villagers are clearly hiding something. It's a premise that's been done a thousand times, but it works when the execution commits. Lynda Renham, who's known more for romantic comedy than psychological suspense, swings for the thriller fences here. She doesn't quite connect.
The Village That Forgot to Be Scary
Here's the thing about "small town with a dark secret" stories - the secret has to be worth the wait. Shirley Jackson understood this. The residents of Hill House weren't hiding anything; the house itself was the rot. In Secrets and Lies, the mystery is built on a foundation of Flora asking questions, getting vague non-answers, and then... asking more questions. The pacing drags through the middle hours like someone walking through fog who refuses to run. You can see the reveals coming from roughly hour two, and by the time they land, you've already mentally written the ending yourself. The dialogue doesn't help - there are exchanges between Flora and the villagers that feel less like tension-building and more like first-draft placeholder conversations. The kind of lines where characters say exactly what they're feeling with zero subtext. Horror - good horror, real horror - lives in what people don't say. This book hasn't learned that lesson yet.
At 8 hours and 31 minutes, it's not a massive commitment, but it feels longer than it should. The story doesn't earn its runtime because the web of deceit Flora supposedly finds herself tangled in is more like a single thread she keeps tugging on in the same direction.
Rachael Beresford and the Case of the Dim Protagonist
I want to be careful here because narrators are actors, and actors need material. But Rachael Beresford's performance makes Flora sound - and I'm not being cruel, I'm being honest - like someone you wouldn't trust to water your plants while you're on vacation. There's a passivity in the vocal performance that strips Flora of any agency. She sounds bewildered in scenes where she should sound determined. She sounds meek where she should sound suspicious. The effect is that you stop rooting for Flora pretty early on, and once you lose your investment in the protagonist of a mystery thriller, you're just listening to plot mechanics.
The character differentiation is where things get rough. Every man Beresford voices gets the same harsh, vaguely aggressive tone - whether they're supposed to be threatening or friendly. The women who aren't in Flora's social circle all get a working-class lilt that flattens them into a single archetype. It creates this bizarre class divide in the audio where Flora and her friends sound educated and reasonable, and everyone else sounds like a caricature from a different, meaner book. I don't think that's intentional, but it's what you hear. And in audio, what you hear IS the story.
I've listened to narrators who can make mediocre writing disappear behind sheer vocal commitment. Beresford doesn't rescue this material. She reads it. There's a difference between reading and performing, and after 200-plus episodes of my podcast dissecting exactly this distinction, I feel pretty confident saying: this is reading.
Who Gets the Keys to This Haunted House
If you're brand new to the "creepy village" subgenre and have genuinely never encountered this type of story before, you might find some satisfaction here. It hits the expected beats. But if you've read or listened to anything by Ruth Ware, or Lucy Foley, or - look, even a solid episode of Midsomer Murders - you've experienced this template done with sharper teeth. Sister Simon's Murder Case is another one that stays in that same familiar lane — I keep it in mind as a baseline for when a mystery is competent but not quite hungry enough. The narration doesn't elevate, the pacing doesn't tighten when it needs to, and the protagonist you're stuck with for eight-plus hours never becomes someone you're afraid for.
Shirley (my cat) was unimpressed. For once, I agreed with her.
Back on the Shelf It Goes
I wanted this to work. A librarian listening to a gothic-adjacent thriller in a dimly lit library is basically the setup for a great evening. But Secrets and Lies doesn't understand that horror isn't about gore - it's about dread. And a thriller without dread is just a series of events. The narration needed to commit, and it didn't. The story needed to surprise, and it couldn't. I've got a shelf of creepy-village audiobooks I'd point you toward before this one. This isn't one for the podcast queue.
