Review: 'This Stays Between Us' by Sara Ochs
Pub. Date: 15/07/2025
Publisher: SOURCEBOOK Landmarks
Ten years ago
A study abroad program like no other: a month-long trip of education and adventure, exploring everything Australia has to offer. And at first, it's everything best friends Phoebe and Claire, and the rest of the student group expects: sunshine, whirlwind romance, and all-night parties. But it isn't long before cracks begin to form within the group. Ones that lead to Phoebe's disappearance …
Now
It's the call Claire has been waiting for years for. Phoebe's remains have been found. It's time to return, for her and the others to go back to Australia. But as Claire retraces their steps and tries to piece together exactly what happened to her best friend all those years ago, it quickly becomes clear everyone in the group has secrets. Including Claire.
Because only she knows what really happened that fateful day ten years ago. The day she killed her best friend. And she'll do anything she can to keep the others from learning the truth.
This paragraph might threaten to get a little spoiler-y, if you read between my lines, so if you'd like to retain all possible tension for This Stays Between Us, skip to the next one. As the blurb of the novel promises, Claire is stressed about the discovery of Phoebe's remains because she is the one who killed her. I love that as a premise, because girl drama turned into woman drama is ripe for tension and we don't get to see women actually kill out of petty reasons all that often. Not that I am pro-murder, but female characters usually kill because they have been wronged and therefore there is a justification for their actions which leans into the moral. I support women's rights, but I also support women's wrongs, by which I mean that women can be just as irrational, evil, and destructive as men and this too should find its reflection in literature. What annoys me, therefore, is that This Stays Between Us lures me in with the promise of complicated female friendships and murder and then actually keeps turning this on its head, to the point that Claire's guilt remains an eternal question mark until the last page, at which point I was over it. I appreciate that the publishing industry most likely is pushing authors to have as many twists as possible and to retain an element of Gotcha for the last page, so this is a complaint to them as well. I love a reveal in the last few pages, but I do want it to feel earned. If you're going to make me spend hundreds of pages in a character's head, and not make them an unreliable narrator, I shouldn't have to throw out most of those pages in order to appreciate the ending. This is not just an issue with This Stays Between Us, but with many thrillers I've read lately, so I think the idea of the unreliable narrator needs to either be more clearly defined or left to rest for a little.
This Stays Between Us is told through the perspective of Claire in the now and Phoebe's perspective ten years ago. I hadn't expected to get the past through Phoebe's POV but I appreciated it, because it allows us to see the characters through two different sets of eyes. Ten years ago, Phoebe and Claire, along with five others, took part in a study abroad programme through which they got to see all the sights and joys of Australia, from the Great Barrier Reef to the Outback. They are all fresh adults, which means that they are basically children, and so the drama between them is intensely petty. There is fun in that, but it does also get a bit boring to read about twenty-somethings drinking and sleeping with one another. In the "now", told through Claire's perspective, we're ten years later and Phoebe's body has been found. Now all adults, the group comes back together and I had honestly expected them all to be a little bit more mature. If I guess everyone is roughly twenty in the past, they're now thirty and I would honestly expect a little more maturity, especially from Claire. Since the blurb has given us an awareness that she carries some guilt, I'd expect her to be smarter in how she goes about figuring out what is going on. Especially in the last third of the novel, Claire felt like a headless chicken running around.
This is my first read by Sara Ochs and I enjoyed much of what she did. I like the time jump and the switching POVs and how it reveals the little cracks in the story each of them is telling. With both timelines working towards some kind of clarity, there is also a nice tension throughout the book. I did have issues with the characterisation, though, and especially how certain elements of Phoebe's backstory were employed. In the past storyline, there is a lot of partying, drinking, and sleeping around, which is absolutely fun, but at the same time there is some intense stuff in Phoebe's past which darkens much of this. I think thrillers can be an excellent place to address difficult themes, but here it didn't feel as if Ochs was entirely engaging with the darkness but rather let it serve as something of a shortcut towards letting us appreciate Phoebe's complexity as a character. It also ties into the resolution of the mystery in a way that I would have wished that maybe Ochs and her editor would have gone over it again to make sure it all comes across the way they intend. However, for a mystery thriller, This Stays Between Us largely does what it intends to do. The characters all serve their purpose and, like I said above, the structure of the novel itself is nicely plotted.
I give this novel...
3 Universes!
I did enjoy parts of This Stays Between Us, especially the nonsense of young adult energies truly released for the first time. We are our best and worst selves at those ages and Ochs runs full steam with those energies. However, in the end it felt a little over the top to me in many ways and Claire let me down as a main character.
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