Promise Not To Tell

Promise Not To Tell- Jayne Ann Krentz
Berkley/Penguin Group
Release Date: January 2, 2018

Rating:
📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: Seattle gallery owner Virginia Troy has spent years battling the demons that stem from her childhood time in a cult and the night a fire burned through the compound, killing her mother. And now one of her artists has taken her own life, but not before sending Virginia a last picture: a painting that makes Virginia doubt everything about the so-called suicide—and her own past.
 
Like Virginia, private investigator Cabot Sutter was one of the children in the cult who survived that fire...and only he can help her now. As they struggle to unravel the clues in the painting, it becomes clear that someone thinks Virginia knows more than she does and that she must be stopped. Thrown into an inferno of desire and deception, Virginia and Cabot draw ever closer to the mystery of their shared memories—and the shocking fate of the one man who still wields the power to destroy everything they hold dear.

______________________________

When a friend and artist sends Seattle art gallery owner Virginia Troy a photograph of a painting, then burns her house down and throws herself into the ocean, Virginia isn't willing to accept that there isn't more to the story.  Hannah's paintings always showed the nightmares of the past, a fiery inferno with a group of children watching a demon walk out of the flames.  Virginia was one of those children.  She turns to private investigator Cabot Sutter, another one of those survivors, for answers.  Cabot and Virginia quickly find themselves involved with embezzlement, murder, and arson as past and present come together to create a mystery just as deadly today as it was all those years ago.

Promise Not to Tell is the sequel to last year's When All the Girls Have Gone, as Krentz follows three brothers who escaped a fiery death at the hands of cult leader Quinton Zane.  All three- Max, Cabot, and Jack along with their foster father Anson- are convinced that Zane is still alive.  In Promise Cabot is brought firmly into the hunt for Zane as former cult members/victims keep popping up- then dying. Virginia is convinced that her friend Hannah saw, or believes she saw, Zane shorty before her death and tried to warn Virginia through a painting.  What might seem like a string of coincidences to someone else looks sinister to anyone who survived Zane's cult.  The coincidences keep piling up when a woman shows up dead in Virginia's art storage room with Hannah's paintings.  Jayne Ann Krentz keeps the suspense going throughout Promise, ensuring that even when the reader thinks they know what is happening they are still caught by surprise.

Virginia and Cabot are well-written, likable, and complex characters written in Krentz's normal style of hero: each has some flaws and hang-ups from their past, each deals with them in different ways.  Virginia isn't content to hire Cabot and then sit back and let him do all the investigating, but is right in the mix with him the whole way and isn't afraid of saving herself when she needs to.  The writing is fast-paced, full of Krentz's trademark dry humor, quick wit, and suspenseful twists.  Secondary characters are as well fleshed out as the main characters and provide some fun alternate view points.

While I would recommend reading When All the Girls Have Gone before Promise Not to Tell in order  to get the most out of the series, both are stand alone books and a new reader doesn't have to have read one to enjoy the other.  But since Krentz is clearly setting up the next book to follow brother Jack and (hopefully) conclude the Quinton Zane mystery, and since both books are wonderful reads, I definitely recommend rereading Girls and Promise before next year's book comes out!

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review