Edward Kay's Blog - Posts Tagged "investigation"
Our Little Secret
I am especially excited to announce that my next thriller will be released in April of 2026 by DCB/Cormorant Books.
I co-wrote Our Little Secret with my son, Mikhael Klassen-Kay, who at age 22, is emerging as a fine author in his own right.
It's a story that is very personal for both of us, and is inspired by true events. In short, we both attended high schools where teachers who were sexual predators were allowed to prey on students with impunity, because the school administrators buried it, either out of fear of legal action and/or bad press. In one case, a teacher told me many years later that the predator had personally threatened to destroy her career if she reported his sexual encounters with underage students. I can't prove it, but this predator may have actually murdered a would-be whistle blower, a teacher who turned up mysteriously dead one morning following a hit-and-run biking accident near the school. In other cases, at Mikhael's school, sexually predatory teachers were quietly transferred to other school boards.
I was about to report the most egregious perpetrator to the police several years ago, after I received confirmed testimony from victims, only to discover that he had died of cancer three months earlier.
He might have cheated the hangman, I thought, but he wasn't going to cheat me.
And so the seed for Our Little Secret was sewn.
Without giving away any spoilers, the protagonists – Jordan, Nick and Chloe – are three high-school seniors who have overcome various setbacks like dysfunctional families and financial difficultues to win university scholarships.
But in their final semester, they become the targets of a sociopathic, sexually predatory teacher bent on failing them unless they bend to his perverted will.
They are faced with a daunting choice: resign themselves to a future of McJobs...or commit a murder so perfect that maybe, just maybe, they'll get away with it.
Mikhael and I think that fans of Dexter, One of Us is Lying, 13 Reasons Why, Euphoria and Yellowjackets will love the tense cat-and-mouse game that ensues as Jordan, Nick and Chloe first have to deal with a depraved teacher then match wits with a relentless police detective who, like Inspector Javert in Les Miserable, is cruelly obsessed with the letter of the law but is oblivious to the inherent injustice of the situation.
So it's not a "whodunnit" so much as it's a "will-they-get-away-with-it?" - and that won't be revealed until literally the last page.
We have made a book trailer that you can watch on YouTube, and we've just added a dedicated "Our Little Secret" page to my website, featuring bonus content. https://www.edwardkay.com/our-little-...
I co-wrote Our Little Secret with my son, Mikhael Klassen-Kay, who at age 22, is emerging as a fine author in his own right.
It's a story that is very personal for both of us, and is inspired by true events. In short, we both attended high schools where teachers who were sexual predators were allowed to prey on students with impunity, because the school administrators buried it, either out of fear of legal action and/or bad press. In one case, a teacher told me many years later that the predator had personally threatened to destroy her career if she reported his sexual encounters with underage students. I can't prove it, but this predator may have actually murdered a would-be whistle blower, a teacher who turned up mysteriously dead one morning following a hit-and-run biking accident near the school. In other cases, at Mikhael's school, sexually predatory teachers were quietly transferred to other school boards.
I was about to report the most egregious perpetrator to the police several years ago, after I received confirmed testimony from victims, only to discover that he had died of cancer three months earlier.
He might have cheated the hangman, I thought, but he wasn't going to cheat me.
And so the seed for Our Little Secret was sewn.
Without giving away any spoilers, the protagonists – Jordan, Nick and Chloe – are three high-school seniors who have overcome various setbacks like dysfunctional families and financial difficultues to win university scholarships.
But in their final semester, they become the targets of a sociopathic, sexually predatory teacher bent on failing them unless they bend to his perverted will.
They are faced with a daunting choice: resign themselves to a future of McJobs...or commit a murder so perfect that maybe, just maybe, they'll get away with it.
Mikhael and I think that fans of Dexter, One of Us is Lying, 13 Reasons Why, Euphoria and Yellowjackets will love the tense cat-and-mouse game that ensues as Jordan, Nick and Chloe first have to deal with a depraved teacher then match wits with a relentless police detective who, like Inspector Javert in Les Miserable, is cruelly obsessed with the letter of the law but is oblivious to the inherent injustice of the situation.
So it's not a "whodunnit" so much as it's a "will-they-get-away-with-it?" - and that won't be revealed until literally the last page.
We have made a book trailer that you can watch on YouTube, and we've just added a dedicated "Our Little Secret" page to my website, featuring bonus content. https://www.edwardkay.com/our-little-...
