Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman (2004, Paperback)

from Aeroette

Two eleven year old girls are asked to leave a birthday party after one of them gets angry and accidentally hits the birthday girl's mother. They are allowed to leave without a ride home and without any adult supervision. On their way home, they spot a baby in a carriage, unsupervised, outside th...

from nbmars

Every Secret Thing is a standalone mystery that is not part of the Tess Monaghan detective series. This dark story from Lippman was inspired by a real crime in which two ten-year-old boys killed a three-year-old boy. In Every Secret Thing, the perpetrators are two eleven-year-old lower class whit...

from SandyLee

Two eleven-year-old girls kidnap what they believe to be an abandoned baby. A few days later the baby is found dead. Fast forward seven years as the two girls are released from prison. Then other children start disappearing. Alice and Ronnie are the two girls. As the reader gets inside each of th...

from slpenney07

Summary: Two eleven year old girls are convicted after they kidnap the baby girl of a prominent public official. Seven years later, they are released and babies start disappearing again. The Take-Away: I really thought that this would be tough to read, but the violence stayed off the pages. It wa...

from allison.sivak

This was better-written than I expected a mass-market paperback to be. And it had a good twist at the end. However, I disliked the "born bad" explanation for the murder; that is just as "easy" and stereotypical as blaming the girl from the tough home.