Someone Knows

Someone Knows by Lisa Scottoline
Penguin Random House: 4/9/19
eBook review copy; 400 pages
ISBN-13: 9780525539643

Someone Knows by Lisa Scottoline is a recommended psychological domestic thriller.

Four fifteen-year-old teenagers find a gun buried in the woods and proceed to obsess over it and each other. Two of the teens are going through some serious hidden real-life trauma (Allie Garvey and David Hybrinski) and two are creating their own upper-class privileged teenage angst (Sasha Barrow and Julian Browne). When a fifth teen (Kyle Gallagher) who is already experiencing a life-changing trauma is added to the group, the dynamics change. A night of drinking ends with deadly results and the teens keep that night a secret, going their separate ways.

The turning point, the unbearable secret the teens share doesn't occur until the half-way point of the novel. The lead up to the event is spent in character development of the five teens, focusing on their lives and their secrets. Then the novel jumps ahead to the future when Allie is attending the funeral of one of the group. She realizes that the decision the four made has left her with guilt that has eaten away at her ever since that one fateful night.

This is really a novel of highly dysfunctional families and a very stupid teenage mistake. The ending is over-the-top and the final twist was... head-shakenly unbelievable. Part of the problem is that you are waiting until the novel is half over for the huge game-changer and you are spending the time leading up to that focused on these teens, their problems, their emotions, and their families. Then the whole tone of the novel changes into a different novel.

Since this is a Scottoline novel, she partially gets away with this because she's such a good writer. I paused only twice, wondering what was going on with the pacing while waiting for the game changing event, and then the end, which seemed like a very different novel in comparison to the first half. When I finished it, I had to wait before even trying to write a review because my initial impression was so poor. In summary, The quality of the writing is excellent, the characters are well developed, the pacing is very uneven, and the ending requires you to set disbelief aside.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Penguin Random House.