Keep Me Like a Secret: A Novel

New York Times bestselling author Stacy Willingham unearths a Southern town's darkest secrets in her latest twisty thriller

Back in 1999, four ten-year-old girls were kidnapped in Fairhope, Alabama, one at a time. Three of them never came home, but Rachel Pratt, the sole survivor of the “Fairhope Four”, fought her way free and lived to tell the tale.

Fairhope is the kind of small town where bad things don’t happen, so the case made national news. It was primarily Rachel’s testimonythat sent her kidnapper, Simon Burkett, to death row—but now, twenty-six years later, Simon's sentence has been overturned on a technicality, and Rachel is in the news all over again.

This time, however, she’s no longer the brave little girl who escaped, but the villain who may have put an innocent man behind bars.

Two weeks after Simon’s release, another girl goes missing in Fairhope, and Rachel returns to her hometown in fear that her own nightmare is happening again. As the days pass, she is overwhelmed with her memories of that long ago summer, and begins to doubt her own recollections. Has Simon Burkett struck again, or has another monster emerged in Fairhope? Determined to uncover the truth, once and for all, Rachel dives head-first into her own investigation, no matter whose deepest secrets she will unravel—including her own.