Since I launched my podcast, Inside the Writer’s Studio, in 2017, I have focussed on that medium for talking to you about writing, authors, and books. I’ve recorded 41 episodes now, and if you haven’t listened it, I hope you will. But now that the podcast is well established, publishers send me books to see if I’d like to have the authors on the show. They send me lots of books and pitch more authors than I can possibly interview (I interview one author on each episode and we have two episodes a month). Sometimes, I love the book, but jus don’t have space to fit the author into the schedule. So, I’m going to use this space for an occasional book review for those books. It’s also worth reminding you that I have a new novel coming out in early fall of 2020, so as the time draws near, I’ll keep you posted on that as well. But for now, here’s a review of a book that will keep you turning pages all night long.

Review: Someone We Know by Shari Lapena

If the measure of a good mystery is the reader’s wanting to turn the page, then I have no choice but to give Someone We Know five stars. Only the necessity for sustenance kept me from reading this novel in one sitting; the necessity for sleep didn’t enter into the equation at all. This was a one-day book for me and it was the most enjoyable day of reading I’d had in a while. Lapena weaves a web of intrigue that keeps you guessing until the very end, which is exactly what we want from our mysteries. Yes, if Someone We Know were just a great page-turner, it would absolutely be worth your attention.

But my day of enjoyable reading was followed up by the next day and the next when I couldn’t get this book out of my head; days when I kept thinking about the ideas it had delved into. Turns out, Someone We Know is more than a page-turner. Yes there is a brutal crime, yes there is a seemingly ordinary neighborhood in which each neighbor realizes one of the others is a killer, but the book doesn’t stop there.

As the pages turn on, the secrets of this neighborhood are revealed one by one. Ordinary houses in an ordinary suburb hide one dark secret after another, and all the missteps and wrong deeds of the neighbors are related in some way to the vicious murder that takes place in the opening pages. We know that in the end the murderer will be found and brought to justice—that’s what happens in a murder mystery. But what about everyone else? What justice will there be for all the people who have been wronged and might never have known it unless the façade of the neighborhood had been peeled back by a murder investigation?

Someone We Know might deal with murder in a conventional way, but it asks uncomfortable questions about justice—questions that kept me thinking for days after I had finished. In the end, I realized that there was not one but two central questions in this thrill ride: we find ourselves asking, when it’s all over, not just who committed the crime, but who is guilty. The first question is easily answered by the final twists and turns of the story. The second is a good deal more complicated, and is left to the reader to ponder. After all, the next time, it might be someone you know.