Format: E-Galley, 400 pages
Release Date: April 9, 2019
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thrillers / Suspense
Bestselling and award-winning author Lisa Scottoline reaches new heights with this riveting novel about how a single decision can undo a family, how our past can derail our present, and how not guilty doesn’t always mean innocent.
Allie Garvey is heading home to the funeral of a childhood friend. Allie is not only grief-stricken, she’s full of dread. Because going home means seeing the other two people with whom she shares an unbearable secret.
Twenty years earlier, a horrific incident shattered the lives of five teenagers, including Allie. Drinking and partying in the woods, they played a dangerous prank that went tragically wrong, turning deadly. The teenagers kept what happened a secret, believing that getting caught would be the worst thing that could happen. But time has taught Allie otherwise. Not getting caught was far worse.
Allie has been haunted for two decades by what she and the others did, and by the fact that she never told a soul. The dark secret has eaten away at her, distancing her from everyone she loves, including her husband. Because she wasn’t punished by the law, Allie has punished herself, and it’s a life sentence.
Now, Allie stands on the precipice of losing everything. She’s ready for a reckoning, determined to learn how the prank went so horribly wrong. She digs to unearth the truth, but reaches a shocking conclusion that she never saw coming—and neither will the reader.
A deeply emotional examination of family, marriage, and the true nature of justice, Someone Knows is Lisa Scottoline’s most powerful novel to date. Startling, page-turning, and with an ending that’s impossible to forget, this is a tour de force by a beloved author at the top of her game.
Lisa Scottoline's Someone Knows is the story of group of teens who got carried away, had too much to drink and one of
them ended up dead. The survivors agreed to keep the truth of what
happened secret. But, 20 years later, Allie Garvey has returned home for the
funeral of one of those friends and she has to face the consequences of
her actions. Allie has suffered both mentally and
physically from what happened since then and finds her life and her marriage is falling
apart. When the co-conspirators reunite, will the truth come out, or will even more secrets be exposed?
The story starts in the present, then flips back 20 years to the 90's when Allie, Sasha Barrow, Julian Browne, and David Hybrinski were teens who got drunk and a new kid ends up dead thanks to a prank that went horribly and tragicaly wrong. It is fair to say that this group of characters had no redeeming qualities at all. Sasha is an entitled rich girl who can have any boy she wants. Julian has been focused so much on Sasha, that he doesn't see that there's no future. And, David, well David's family's expectations may have blurred who he really is.
As for 15-year Allie, she was never been popular. She and her sister
Jill were best friends, but after Jill dies from Cystic Fibrosis, Allie
is left feeling alone and adrift. Her mother rarely gets out of bed, her father is obsessed with raising money in hopes of one day curing
the terrible disease that shattered their family's happiness, and it's
all Allie can do to get through the days. But when she comes upon three
of the most popular kids in the neighborhood burying a gun in the woods,
Allie begins to wonder if she just might be on the road to popularity. Especially when she thinks that David might have feelings for her.
Things change when Kyle Gallagher, a new kid in town with a bag filled with secrets, tries to join their group.
Julian is particularly opposed to his presence, seeing him as a rival
for Sasha's affection, and in an attempt to scare him off, Julian orders
him to play Russian Roulette. No one else is
particularly fond of this idea, but no one wants to go against Julian's
wishes, so Kyle eventually complies, and as you might imagine, ends up
dead.
My reason for the rating is 2-fold. Too many narratives. The story literally rotates between a bunch of characters. Most of the characters have no redeeming values. While Allie did suffer in silence for 20 years, which has eroded her marriage, she could have stood up with a strong voice and told what really happened that night. Especially when everyone thought it was a suicide, including the police.
I felt the most for Kyle, and no, I won't tell you his back story. Let's just say that he didn't deserve anything that happened to him. His entire life was uprooted, he was prevented from playing the sport that he loves for fear someone who recognize him, his mother does everything she can to protect him and support him, then he is taken away from her in a blink of an eye. The ending is truly eye opening. Nope, I won't spoil it except to say that you should prepare yourself for anything to happen.
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Prologue
Nobody
tells you that you’ll do things when you’re young that are so stupid,
so unbelievably stupid, so horrifically stupid that years later you
won’t be able to believe it. You’ll be on your laptop, or reading a
book, or pumping gas, and you’ll find yourself shaking your head because
you’ll be thinking no, no, no, I did not do that, I was not a part of
that, that could not have happened.
You’ll
tell yourself that you were young, that you were drinking, that good
teenagers make bad decisions all the time. But you know that’s not it.
You know that when teenagers get together, something dark can take over.
Call it peer pressure, call it a collective idiocy, call it something
more primal and monstrous, like whatever makes frat boys haze their
so-called brothers to death. Writ large, it makes Nazis murder millions
and soldiers torch Vietnamese villages. But whatever you call it, it
will make you do the worst thing you ever did in your life. And in your
darkest moments, you will wonder if it made you do it, or simply allowed
you to.
You know
this now but you didn’t then, and you’ll shake your head, thinking I
can’t believe I did that, I can’t believe I was a part of that, but you
were, and not in Nazi Germany, My Lai, or a frat house, but in the
safest place you can imagine—in the suburban housing development where
you grew up, specifically in a patch of woods mandated by township
zoning, confined by fences, and bordered by the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
In other words, in a completely civilized location where even Nature
herself is domesticated and nothing ever happens.
Except this one night.
You
and your friends decide to play Russian Roulette, a game so obviously
lethal that you can’t even imagine what you were thinking. Days later,
years later, a decade later, it’s still so unspeakable you can’t say a
word to anyone, and all the books you read that you should’ve learned
something from—Lord of the Flies, A Separate Peace, and Crime and
Punishment—teach you absolutely nothing. You read like a fiend, you
always have, but you don’t let the books teach you anything. You never
apply them to your life because they’re fiction, or even if they seem
real, they’re someone else’s life, not your life, except that you and
your friends decided to play a prank and someone blew their brains out
in front of you.
You
won’t be able to remember exactly what happened because of the booze and
the horror, the absolute horror, and yet you won’t be able to forget
it, though you’ll spend night after night trying. People say something
was a night to remember, but this was a night to forget and yet you
can’t forget, and then you’ll hear some random playlist and Rihanna
singing don’t act like you forgot and you’ll realize you’ve been acting
like you forgot your entire adult life, and you’ll feel accused by a
song, nailed by a phrase, and don’t act like you forgot is everything,
don’t act like you forgot is all, and you’ll pick up the bottle and say
to yourself, I’m acting like I forgot but I didn’t, I didn’t forget, and
you’ll need to be put out of your own misery, so you’ll drink and
drink, trying to drink yourself to death.
But that takes too long. Years too long. Time doesn’t move fast enough. You learned that the hard way.
One night, you’ll lose patience.
