How Will I Know You.  Do You Ever Really Know Your Family?

how will i know you book review @duffythewriter

How Will I Know You. On a cold December day, teenager Joy Enright is found drowned at the edge of a frozen pond. When an autopsy reveals she was strangled first, suspicion is thrown onto Martin, the young graduate who was last to see her alive. In a small community, secrets are hard to keep and as the web of lies around Joy’s life and death unravels, the truth will either bring one family closer together or tear them further apart.

Jessica Treadway has a talent for writing detailed, human stories with complicated, yet realistic family dynamics.  The characters in Treadway’s books tend to stay with you much longer than the incident, in this case, murder. The story is told from four points of view, and each character weaves their sticky web around Joy’s life. I found the constant back and forth a little hard to follow in the first third of the book, the characters, to me, had the same voices, so I had to stop, flick back a page, and read again to clarify who I was reading about.  Maybe this would have been better with the point of view from just Joy and one other, with the other characters appearing with them. Or, perhaps there could have been more definite language changes, particularly between friends Harper, Delaney, and Joy.

Once I found my reading groove and who was who, I enjoyed the suspense, with the ending a surprise to me. If you love a character driven book, detailing the intricacies of personal relationships, lies, and secrets rather than ‘who did it,’ then you will enjoy How Will I Know You.

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as If She Did It (Lacy Eye in the US) which I loved, but a solid, suspenseful thriller. I will continue to read Treadway’s detailed, small town thrillers, the characters will always have me coming back for more!

Read this if you enjoyed If She Did It and Where They Found Her

3 out of 5 from me

Buy it now at Booktopia!

The Book Synopsis – How Will I Know You?

A page-turner about the murder of a teenage girl, from the author of Lacy Eye.

On a cold December day in northern upstate New York, the body of high school senior Joy Enright is discovered in the woods at the edge of a pond. She had been presumed drowned, but an autopsy shows that she was, in fact, strangled. As the investigation unfolds, four characters tell the story from widely divergent perspectives: Susanne, Joy’s mother and a professor at the local art college; Martin, a black graduate student suspected of the murder; Harper, Joy’s best friend and a potential eyewitness; and Tom, a rescue diver and son-in-law of the town’s police chief. As a web of small-town secrets comes to light, a dramatic conclusion reveals the truth about Joy’s death.

 

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