controlling the narrative
Elizabeth Davis has an easy summer. As an English professor, she has to teach several classes through the winter and spring semesters, but during the summer, she only has one class, English 101. She only goes in to her office two days a week.
She is anticipating a restful summer, until she starts reading the chapters from her yearlong online creative writing seminar. There is one piece that catches her attention immediately. The Reckoning by Hannah Greer grips her with a story about a senior girl in high school who has a crush on her teacher. As she reads, she notices details that are familiar to her, and she realizes that what she is reading isn’t actually fiction. It’s something that happened to her friend twenty years ago. Her friend Jocelyn had an affair with her teacher, Mr. Sawyer, when they were in high school.
Elizabeth knows that this writing is not coming from Jocelyn because she wouldn’t talk about it. And it wasn’t coming from Mr. Sawyer, because she had killed him. So who is sending her these chapters, and how do they know about what happened with such precise detail?
She had left her small Southern town to move to New York City, where she could be anonymous and craft a new life. And she’s done well for herself. She has a good job, she has a nice place to live, and she has men to spend time with. The most recent one is Sam, a police detective. He doesn’t know her past, and she likes it that way. But with more chapters landing in her email, and more details echoing the exact situation her friend found herself in, Elizabeth gets more and more anxious. She hadn’t told anyone about what happened. They had another friend, Ivy, who knew what was happening, but she and Elizabeth promised never to talk about what really happened.
But now, either someone has broken that promise, or someone else knows what happened.
Even more chapters reveal a disturbing relationship between Jocelyn and her teacher, controlling and abusive as well as romantic, and Elizabeth can’t understand how someone knows so much about what happened back then. But she knows she needs to figure it out, so she goes home to Louisiana. She sees the mother who had been an alcoholic. She sees her high school boyfriend. She sees Ivy, although Ivy tells her to go away. And she meets Noah, a bewitching man Elizabeth can’t seem to stay away from, even after learning that his father was Mr. Sawyer, the teacher from the story.
Why are these chapters showing up in her life? Is someone trying to send her a message? Is she in danger? As she unravels, dipping from anxiety to paranoia, Elizabeth has to figure out what is going on, and why, and try to keep herself safe from a potential stalker set on a twisted trail of revenge.
Someone Knows is a twisted story of secrets and stalking. It is a roller coaster, taking readers to great heights to spin them around and plunge down to a whole different emotional place. It’s spicy and dark and filled with secrets. I genuinely didn’t know who was sending the stories until the end. I got caught up in this story and I couldn’t put it down. I really enjoyed this book, but it does have an edge to it, mostly in that relationship between the teacher and the teenager, and I did have some trouble with that. But the characters are well developed and it is a good solid thriller from a skilled writer.
Egalleys for Someone Knows were provided by Atria Books through NetGalley, with many thanks, but the opinions are mine.
