Like most Lifetime movies from mystery best-sellers, tonight’s “Secrets of Eden” begins with the unthinkable — murder in small town, USA.
Eden, Vt. is the place where life is easy and the living is clean — or so it seems. But behind closed doors, things happen that don’t ever see the light of day. Take perfect couple Alice (Sonya Salomaa) and George (Graham Abbey), and their beautiful teen daughter, Kate (Samantha Munro).
To all outward appearances, we’re told in voiceover, they seem like the perfect, happy family. Why we’re told that I can’t say, since everyone in town knows that Alice and George have recently gotten back together after being separated for several months.
The movie opens with Pastor Drew (John Stamos) going into the house and finding Alice dead. The next thing we see is the cops at the house the next day — because both Alice and George are dead. Turns out that one night George, in a rage, chokes Alice to death because she had gotten baptized by Pastor Drew, without his permission.
At first, Det. Catherine Benicasa (Anna Gunn), believes that it was a murder/suicide, but the coroner tells her that George was murdered four hours after Alice. He also says that George couldn’t have shot himself because of the angle of the shot, and because the gun was wiped clean.
Anyway, during her separation, Alice had been in counseling with Pastor Drew, who showed her that a woman doesn’t have to be abused to feel loved. One counseling session leads to another and, before you know it, the reverend counselor and the abused wife are having an affair.
Did Pastor Drew kill George after he walked in and found Alice dead? It certainly seems very likely — or so Benicasa and Alice’s friends Ginny (Lisa Ryder) and Heather (Heather Karkanis) seem to think. But why is Heather hitting on the pastor — and why is Ginny so angry with him?
“Secrets of Eden” comes from Chris Bohjalian’s best-selling book, which must have had more meat to its bones than this movie, which seems to have been boiled down to its simplest ingredients.