Kate Alice Marshall returns with her second adult thriller No One Can Know, a new murder mystery in which nothing is as it seems, nobody can be trusted and the twists keep coming until the final page. While the murder of our protagonist Emma’s parents took place 14 years in the past, the lingering effects of that traumatic night still haunt her and when dire circumstances force her to return home to the small town where everyone is convinced she committed those murders, long-held secrets will emerge with deadly consequences.
The story heavily favours Emma’s second-person perspective with chapters darting back and forth in time between ‘Then’ and ‘Now’, however her sisters Daphne and Juliette also have some chapters dedicated to their perspective in the past and present. We know from the start that Emma is innocent and takes charge of covering up the evidence that could link either sister to the murder of the Palmer parents, but the mystery throughout the book is which sister committed the crime or whether there’s the slim possibility of an outsider having killed their parents instead.
As a sixteen year old, Emma was determined to protect both sisters and weathered the intense police investigation as well as the scorn and disdain of the townsfolk, but now that she’s thirty and newly pregnant, her martyrdom is at an end as her baby’s future is her main concern and Emma has no intention of her child growing up with this tainted reputation hanging over their head. With renewed zeal, Emma begins to dig into the past to clear her name and ensure the real killer is brought to justice, but she has no idea of the Pandora’s Box that she is opening and the lengths people will go to in desperation to hide their sins.
As always, the plot is meticulously calculated to bamboozle the reader and lead us astray with red herrings a-plenty, copious motives for murder and no easy way to pinpoint the killer when the more Emma unearths about her parents’ lives, the more potential suspects stand out. Thriller aficionados may potentially be able to pick out the killer early on, but the twisty winding journey that Emma takes is sure to stump most readers and keep people changing their minds from one chapter to the next. This author excels at breathing life into her characters and fleshing out their backstories to provide them with real depth, believable agendas and complex interpersonal dynamics. The relationship between the estranged sisters is so thorny and layered with love, betrayal and sorrow; watching them navigate their complicated and shadowed history keeps us on tenterhooks, uncertain whether they will ally with each other or face off against one another instead.
This book’s appeal lies in the suspenseful mystery behind the murder of the Palmers and gradual unspooling of character motivations in the past and present timelines, ratcheting up the tension and drama as events spiral out of control the further Emma pries into her family history. What may affect the reader’s enjoyment is whether they require likeable characters to populate the cast; while Emma is the most sympathetic character given her self-sacrifice to save her sisters, she is frustratingly meek and downtrodden as an adult, accepting her husband’s increasingly appalling behaviour without protest. It’s difficult to witness their interactions without wishing to reach into the page and physically slap some sense into the man! Her sisters are survivors who have made difficult choices in their own best interests and it’s hard to root for them when we’re constantly wondering if they committed the murders. There’s a shortage of likeable characters with Gabriel being the only prominent character who is truly decent, but Emma’s childhood friend isn’t the main focus of the story, although his dynamic with her is lovely and endearing.
For a psychological thriller that offers a gripping murder mystery, suspenseful action and a compelling family drama with a focus on the bonds and trials of sisterhood, make sure to pick up No One Can Know.
No One Can Know is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of January 23rd 2024.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
The author of What Lies in the Woods returns with a novel about three sisters, two murders, and too many secrets to count.
Emma hasn’t told her husband much about her past. He knows her parents are dead and she hasn’t spoken to her sisters in years. Then they lose their apartment, her husband gets laid off, and Emma discovers she’s pregnant―right as the bank account slips into the red.
That’s when Emma confesses that she has one more asset: her parents’ house, which she owns jointly with her estranged sisters. They can’t sell it, but they can live in it. But returning home means that Emma is forced to reveal her secrets to her husband: that the house is not a run-down farmhouse but a stately mansion, and that her parents died there.
Were murdered.
And that some people say Emma did it.
Emma and her sisters have never spoken about what really happened that night. Now, her return to the house may lure her sisters back, but it will also crack open family and small-town secrets lots of people don’t want revealed. As Emma struggles to reconnect with her old family and hold together her new one, she begins to realize that the things they have left unspoken all these years have put them in danger again.
