Fast-moving and captivating read centres on a secret

Secrets in stories, whether on page or screen, are tricky things. Everyone knows that in real life, people keep secrets irrationally, not to say stupidly, and that’s just how things are. One of the lovely things about stories, though, is that they need to adhere to a higher standard in order to engineer the suspension of disbelief, because if we wanted messy, pointless idiocy, we have real people for that. So, a story that hinges on a secret ideally needs that secret to feel meaningfully and rationally kept unless the character is depicted as sufficiently erratic and irrational to make foolish secret-keeping meaningful and rational to them. Such Good People hinges on a secret. Is that secret meaningfully and rationally kept? No. Is the character keeping it erratic and irrational? No. This should mean that the book doesn’t work. But, happily, it does.

The secret that April, Blumenfeld’s central character, keeps from her husband – Peter, the altruistic lawyer in the middle of a campaign for Cook County State’s Attorney – is the forthcoming release of her best friend Rudy, who has been in jail on a manslaughter charge for 13 years, and a journalist’s phone call threatening to link April to the historic crime. April’s reason for not immediately telling him is dubiously flimsy, while the violence of Peter’s reaction when it all comes out almost straight away, and the crisis sparked by the incident given Peter’s employment of hotshot PR people and the fairly obvious way in which the story could be spun positively, all seem rather illogical.

The fact that Blumenfeld manages to make a reader as pedantic as this one overlook these issues is testament to her fast-moving and captivating plot, the tenderness she is able to evoke for April, Rudy and their respective parents, and the interesting parallel between the character of Peter – the ideal husband whose ambition obscures his goodness and his perception of the goodness of his wife – and Jillian Jones, the journalist whose youthful careerism leads to Rudy’s arrest, and whose redemption arc leads her into both goodness and happiness as she manages to transcend the baseness of ambition.

In this way, Blumenfeld manages to make a breezy summer beach read into something that feels a little more conceptually substantial without compromising on the formulaic and the fun that will make readers, including the pedant writing this review, want to read the novel in as few sittings as possible. Any book that makes me want to spend even more time reading than I ordinarily do is one that I would recommend, and I will certainly choose to read whatever Blumenfeld writes next.