Publication Date: March 27, 2018
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
"Full of slow-burning intrigue, Strawser's
second novel will appeal to fans of Liane Moriarty's Big Little
Lies and Jennifer Kitses' Small Hours." ―Booklist
*Book of the Month Club Selection
An innocent night of fun takes a shocking turn in Not That I Could Tell, the next page-turner from Jessica Strawser, author of Almost Missed You.
*Book of the Month Club Selection
An innocent night of fun takes a shocking turn in Not That I Could Tell, the next page-turner from Jessica Strawser, author of Almost Missed You.
When a group of neighborhood women gathers, wine
in hand, around a fire pit where their backyards meet one Saturday night, most
of them are just ecstatic to have discovered that their baby monitors reach
that far. It’s a rare kid-free night, and they’re giddy with it. They drink too
much, and the conversation turns personal.
By Monday morning, one of them is gone.
Everyone knows something about everyone else in the
quirky small Ohio town of Yellow Springs, but no one can make sense of the
disappearance. Kristin was a sociable twin mom, college administrator, and
doctor’s wife who didn’t seem all that bothered by her impending divorce―and
the investigation turns up more questions than answers, with her husband, Paul,
at the center. For her closest neighbor, Clara, the incident triggers memories
she thought she’d put behind her―and when she’s unable to extract herself from
the widening circle of scrutiny, her own suspicions quickly grow. But the
neighborhood’s newest addition, Izzy, is determined not to jump to any
conclusions―especially since she’s dealing with a crisis of her own.
As the police investigation goes from a media
circus to a cold case, the neighbors are forced to reexamine what’s going on
behind their own closed doors―and to ask how well anyone really knows
anyone else.
The story mainly goes back and forth between two
main perspectives: Clara’s and Izzy’s. While the story takes off right after a
bunch of neighborhood women gather together for wine around a bonfire, it only
follows Clara and Izzy’s point of views after the disappearance of Kristin, one
of the women in the local community. I was, first of all, disappointed in this.
There were more women at that bonfire – what about their thoughts?
However, I enjoyed Clara’s chapters far more than
Izzy’s. Izzy’s background and reasons for moving to Yellow Springs were
re-hashed and re-hashed over and over until she became a whiny character to me.
Izzy’s chapters had no depth and no intriguing parts for me. However, Clara’s
chapters were where I felt that the most suspenseful and mysterious things
happened. I loved seeing Kristin, the missing woman, through Clara’s eyes.
Unlike Izzy, Clara actually spends her chapters going over Kristin’s life, their
conversations, and really tries to help solve the mystery of her disappearance.
Then there is the character of Paul, Kristin’s
soon-to-be ex-husband. Paul was creepy, unlikeable, and totally untrustworthy.
I liked that his character was added to the story. I felt that he added a bit
of suspense and kept me, and the other characters, on edge.
For a mystery/thriller, I felt that the writing
lacked suspense, lacked the fast pace that I am used to with mystery novels,
and lacked the ability to keep me guessing. I felt that the pace was slow,
partly because I did not like Izzy as a character and partly because I wanted
to know more about Kristin than I was given. I felt, as the reader, I was not
given enough information or backstory about Kristin in order to make
speculations about what could have happened to her. I wanted more and more to
be revealed as the story progressed, but it fell short for me. We are given
some clues, but by the time they were revealed, I had already guessed most of
them.
Ever wonder what your friends really think of you?
"It's no great accomplishment to get someone
to believe a lie. It's not that hard, really. Look at me: doctor's wife,
working mom, good neighbor. You've already summed me up, haven't you? You're
already filling in the blanks. But whatever you're writing there, it's not the
truth. And that's fine by me. It's easier, knowing you don't know me at
all."
“The missing, the hidden, the murdered and the
other wise lost never get to tell their sides of the story. It’s the last and
sometimes cruelest injustice.”
I won’t lie…the big twist is quite remarkable and
made the story better for me. However, I was not impressed with most other
parts of the novel. I am such a character driven reader and the characters just
did not feel fleshed out to me; I did not connect to them, feel for them, or
really care what happened to them. The only character that I wanted to know
more about was Kristin, and I just didn’t get that information fast enough.
When I pick up a thriller/mystery that is pitched as the next Big Little Lies, I expect it to be
fast-paced and completely guttural when it comes to the plot and character development.
This felt more like contemporary fiction than the mystery/thriller that it is
pitched as.
No comments:
Post a Comment