She Treads Softly: You Deserve to Know

Wednesday, February 19, 2025

You Deserve to Know

You Deserve to Know by Aggie Blum Thompson
3/11/25; 336 pages
Tor/Forge Publishing Group

You Deserve to Know by Aggie Blum Thompson is a highly recommended domestic thriller. This is a good choice for everyone who enjoys suspense novels full of bad behavior in the suburbs.

In East Bethesda, a suburb of Washington DC, three couples, Aimee and Scott, Gwen and Anton and Lisa and Marcus enjoy regularly gathering together with their children and socializing. After their usual Friday night get together, Gwen's husband Anton is found murdered behind the local watering hole. Aimee's husband Scott was one of the last people to see Anton before his murder. He is also clearly hiding a secret from her. Lisa resents Gwen's addition to the group. Now the police are investigating and this increases the tension between the three women.

With friends like these, who needs enemies. And so it goes as a soap opera worthy web of deception, betrayal, and revenge explodes in the neighborhood between these three women. None of these women are likable, but they are presented as fully realized individuals.

All the various story lines create plenty of intrigue and suspense as they head toward the twisty ending. The opening of the novel points out through an interview that the book is written as autofiction, where the author recounts a real life event in a fictionalized manner. The narrative seemed overwrought at times but the ending was worth it and bumped the rating up.

You Deserve to Know is for those who relish suburban domestic thrillers. Thanks to Tor/Forge Publishing for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.