Promise Not To Tell by Jennifer McMahon

This novel will keep you up all night. I was snuggled up under the blankets, jumping at ever sound, my heart beating fast, my palms sweat but I kept on reading up until a little past five this morning.

It normally takes a lot to frighten me, heck I don't even blink at "scary" movies but the end of this book was addicting, frightening and riveting.

This is perhaps the creepiest, most nerve racking ghost story I've read or my lack of sleep made everything much more scarier than it really was!

This novel is full of secrets, secrets friends, lovers, betrayals and sexual abuse. This novel will captivate you. Terrific first book for McMahon she has a lot to live up to in her next novels... not quite sure she will be able to recapture it, it's THAT good!

Go read the sample chapter at barnesandnoble.com, I promise you'll be running out to purchase this book!

Grade: A+

Synopsis:

Forty-one-year-old school nurse Kate Cypher has returned home to rural Vermont to care for her mother who's afflicted with Alzheimer's. On the night she arrives, a young girl is murdered—a horrific crime that eerily mirrors another from Kate's childhood. Three decades earlier, her dirt-poor friend Del—shunned and derided by classmates as "Potato Girl"—was brutally slain. Del's killer was never found, while the victim has since achieved immortality in local legends and ghost stories. Now, as this new murder investigation draws Kate irresistibly in, her past and present collide in terrifying, unexpected ways. Because nothing is quite what it seems . . . and the grim specters of her youth are far from forgotten.
More than just a murder mystery, Jennifer McMahon's extraordinary debut novel, Promise Not to Tell, is a story of friendship and family, devotion and betrayal—tautly written, deeply insightful, beautifully evocative, and utterly unforgettable.