REVIEW: IN TOO DEEP by Bea Davenport

Layer upon layer of violence and deceit make up the full picture for Maura to see and the reporter to reveal. Hidden secrets are uncovered that have been left to settle, for far too long. But in life some things can’t be left unsaid, and eventually the truth will out. Whatever the consequences.

Growing up, in school: “I (Maura) had the misfortune of being acceptable but not particular popular. I think, in a way, this is worse than being totally alone and rejected. You can see what you are let in on and what you’re excluded from, what you’re invited to and what was only for a more select group. You can be part only of some conversations, but listen to others without understanding them fully. You’re the one left out when numbers are tight and you have no idea why. So at school I had friends, of a sort, but none that I really trusted or who trusted me, although I longed to be important enough to be taken into someone’s confidence.” She would experience the same in her adopted town Dowerby.

As an already married woman with a young daughter, Maura met Kim. She was her first real friend whom she could trust and who changed her outlook on life in many ways. Kim opened up a world of exciting possibilities to her, which she grabbed onto with everything she had. There was just one problem: the Dowerby town did not find comfort in the feisty, free-spirited new journalist in their midst. They did not appreciate Kim’s nosy questions about town management and people’s private lives, especially not those of the council members. Suddenly there was someone who did not flinch in rocking their safe little wooden boxes in which they flourished on corruption, mismanagement, greed, unfaithfulness, hypocrisy and fraud. Kim knew how to send the wood chips flying everywhere. The only box they would not allow to be shattered was the ancient-old dunking-chair of the Dowerby Fair.

“Everyday Kim said something kind, which I took home with me and thought over, and knew I was lucky.” Kim would also expose the poisoned chalice in her life – one that Maura never would have identified on her own and even denied existed. She taught her daughter to become a people-pleaser like herself to safeguard herself. 

But then Kim, the person who taught her to re-evaluate her own life, believes, self-image, unexpectedly died. The circumstances in which it happened, necessitated Maura to leave her daughter, as well as husband, and flee her old life to start a new life somewhere else under a different name…

For five years she got away with it, until a journalist tracked her down and forced her to confront her past and face her own truths. 

Highly recommended!