Lena’s Reviews > Little Secrets > Status Update

This story covered Maren and Derek and their child Sebastian. One day as Maren is walking in pikes place in Seattle, she gets a phone call which distracts her and she ends up losing her son Sebastian. Both Marin and Derek are very successful with Maren being a celebrity hairstylist and Derek being the CEO of a health company. They use all the means that they’re disposal to help find their son, but unfortunately, they’re unable to find him.

They find out that he was essentially abducted by somebody in a Santa costume who had offered him his favorite lollipop from a local vendor at pikes place. It’s also very notable that Maren has a best friend named Sal who is the owner of a local pub and comes from a family a very famous winery in Washington. He checks on her every single day to make sure that she’s OK.

We find out during the course of this book that Maren had hired a private investigator to look into the kidnapping of her son. During this investigation, the private investigator finds out that Derek is cheating on Maren with a woman named McKenzie. McKenzie is what’s known as a professional girlfriend, meaning that she targets, older, wealthy men, and basically has a relationship with them and ends up, blackmailing them once they are ready to end their relationship with her. McKenzie’s mother has dementia, and so she has to pay a lot of money for the assisted care facilitating with her mother live lives.

Essentially, in summary one day, Cell offers to Marin to hire someone to help take care of her problem, which is McKenzie, her husband’s mistress. He ends up getting her in contact with his friend Julian who he met while he was in imprisoned, and Julia knows people who are able to take care of people. Maren meets with Julian and ends up paying him $250,000 so that he would essentially kill McKenzie.

Maren later changes her mind because she realizes that McKenzie, despite being an awful human being as somebody’s daughter. So she informed Sal to call off the hit on McKenzie.

The plot twist, however, is that Sal McKenzie and Julian are essentially working together to extort Marin and her husband out of a lot of money. Her son Sebastian, who was abducted over a year ago at the point that this plot point is revealed was being hidden in Sal’s family wine Estate in their wine cellar. Earlier on when Sebastian was first abducted, he was contacted by the same group of people saying that for $1 million they’ll return his son. He ends up paying the ransom, but his child is not delivered and the abductor tells Derek that they had killed his son. It turns out, however, that they got stuck when trying to return the boy and so he was not returned to them early on. But Sal’s mother had been taking care of Sebastian because Sal told her that Marin’s husband is abusive and that he’s keeping her there to protect him from his abusive father. Of course, none of this was true.

What they’re trying to do now is essentially they sent Derek a bunch of photos of McKenzie beaten up and say that if you want her alive to pay another quarter of $1 million. He agrees to do that. But Mary’s private investigator intervenes and informed Marin that Sal was in on this the entire time and this was basically a racket, not only to drive her and Derek apart, but also to get as much money from them as possible because Sal’s bar is not doing amazing and they had a lot of debts to pay once they sold the family vineyards.

So in summary what we find out actually happened is that Sal and McKenzie were from the same hometown and he was the one that took her virginity and she basically was in love with him from out small age. He was the one to guide her in these relationships that she got in in order to extort as much money as possible out of her boyfriend’s.

She ends up meeting, Derek and they end up having an affair together when Cell finds us out he sees it as a perfect opportunity to essentially divide up Maren and Derek. But Maren ends up, deciding to stay with Derek, even after finding out that he’s cheating on her because that’s the father of her son.

So then Sal and Julian devise a plot to distract Maryann while she’s out shopping one day so that Julian could go in and steal her son. And they basically wanted to only keep him for a couple of days long enough to get the ransom money. That obviously didn’t work out so they kept Sebastian at the family farmhouse.

The private investigator ends up finding out that this all is connected because Sal and Julian were friends from when they were incarcerated at the same time. The police as well as Derek Marin and the private investigator all drive to the city where the family wine vineyards are. Cell ends up, barricading himself in the house with a gun and says that he’ll only speak to Maren. He ends up telling her everything of what happened that basically they wanted the money and he wanted to be with Marin so that’s why they did everything that they did. He ends up, shooting himself in the head, but before that he tells Marin that her son is in the wine cellar and that he’s safe.

The police end up finding both McKenzie and Sebastian, who were in the wine cellar at that time and maren and Derek and their son end up going home.

The final scene of the book was Maren taking Sebastian to the support group that she had used while he was disappeared. They had thrown Sebastian a surprise kind of welcome home party. She ends up, hugging all of the friends that she had made during this time and saying that her and Derek are essentially taking things one day at a time.

The story overall ends on a happy ending with the family all reunited

The ultimate final scene is Maren going to the coffee shop where McKenzie works to essentially bring her the $250,000 that she had given to the hitman to kill her. She told McKenzie that she’s an awful human being but that in order to clear her conscience and to correct the karma that she had to give her that money.

Overall, a decent book with a good plot twist that I did not see coming for the majority of the book. It was a very engaging read, and I very much wanted to know what happened next. Would give us a 3.5 to 4 stars.