Book Review: No One Needs to Know by Lindsay Cameron
By Janet Webb
June 2, 2023
The three women at the core of No One Needs to Know have a couple of things in common: the school their children attend, and UrbanMyth—a neighborhood chat group they read and post on. And this merely scratches the surface. There’s Heather, the outsider who would do anything to get her daughter into the elite’s good graces and into their even better schools. Money is a constant issue for Heather. Her husband Oliver wants to move to the suburbs, away from the insanely expensive Upper East Side. And there’s Norah, the high-powered executive failing to balance work with the emotional responsibilities of motherhood. Lastly, we have Poppy, whose perfect-on-the-outside façade conceals more than her share of secrets.
Heather is a mass of worries and nerves. She never gets over feeling like an outsider, and believes she must earn affection and respect by being the consummate volunteer at every school her daughter Violet attends. Heather maps out Violet’s life like a general planning a spring offensive: SSATs, summer courses, extra-curricular clubs—she leaves nothing to chance. Heather frequently exhorts her daughter with her favorite phrase, “Eye on the prize.”
A thread throughout No One Needs to Know is the danger and prevalence of electronics. When Heather drops her daughter off at a dance, she watches Violet put her phone in a locked pouch. Unfortunately, another student sneaks in her phone, takes secret pictures and things disintegrate quickly from there. Heather’s helicopter parenting crumbles when pictures of her daughter vaping weed at the exclusive teen social gathering show up on Instagram. The school has a no-second-chance policy on drugs and alcohol, so this is profoundly serious.
Norah has a fantastic job, one that she has worked extremely hard to attain. She did not grow up in an affluent home, nothing and no one eased her path. Consequently, she is enormously single-minded. Her boss is Harris Ridley, Poppy’s husband. Bennett Stillman, Norah’s husband, is a good stepfather to her daughter Caroline, picking up much of the home-front load given Norah’s ridiculous hours. She is content with her home life although her primary focus is working hard and supporting her family. Norah has little use for the endless machinations employed by ambitious Crofton parents to make sure their children get into the right boarding schools, the right colleges, and on and on.
On the face of it, Poppy has it all. Thin and gorgeous, she is married to an enormously wealthy man, lives in a fabulous apartment, and her son Henry is on tap to go to Andover, followed by Harvard. Who needs more? How about affection—feeling those scintillating frissons that are a hallmark of an extra-marital affair. Poppy goes to bed with Bennett Stillman but shockingly, when she slides out of bed, she sees a red light pulsing on her lover’s phone. He taped their lovemaking. Sophisticated Poppy, undisputed Queen Bee of the Crofton parents, fell for an unscrupulous poseur, a scoundrel who demands payment in return for silence. Poppy is stunned:
“Are you … is this … are you blackmailing me?”
He blew the hair from his forehead. “I guess you could call it that.”
She could feel her jaw loosen, her mouth fall open. She was not an emotional person. Not prone to tears or outbursts, but she couldn’t keep her lower lip from trembling as the truth spread over her, inch by excruciating inch. This was all a setup. Bennett had never actually wanted her. He’d wanted her money.
Persons unknown attack the encrypted website everyone uses. The community’s dirty laundry is on display, including texts between lovers. Cameron sprinkles fictitious UrbanMyth posts through the book. These posts and their threads punctuate the swirling problems that threaten to engulf Poppy, Heather, and Norah.
No One Needs to Know has the feel of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery … there are secrets enclosed with more secrets, all of which start bubbling to the surface when Bennett Stillman disappears. It was irresistible to imagine which actors might play the various characters. It’s a cinematic page-turner.