Author: Shari Lapena

Genre: Thriller

Rating: 8/10

Pages: 330

Someone We Know juggles characters and half a dozen others skillfully. Readers will go back and forth many times while attempting to guess the identity of the murderer. The additional introduction of Raleigh Sharpe’s crimes, as well as some other shady things that are later uncovered, threatens to tear this small Aylesford community apart. Another top-notch read from Shari Lapena, who has definitely firmly supplanted herself in the domestic Summary

The setting of this book takes place in a quiet suburb in a   fictional town of Aylesford, located in New York State’s Hudson Valley. Two families receive an anonymous apology letter about a son who snuck up into their houses, but the problem is when one of the neighbours is murdered. This brings up all the secrets of the suburb. The end result is a novel that displays one of the biggest fears in modern times—just how little we really know about our neighbors and those who live right near us.

A man named Robert Pierce calls the police because his wife, Amanda, had not returned from a weekend away with one of her girlfriends. The problem is that the girlfriend, Caroline Lu, said she never went anywhere with Amanda and knew nothing about her weekend getaway.

The prologue takes us two weeks back in time where we see someone approaching a woman in a kitchen and bringing a hammer down on her head. The mysterious identities of the woman and the attacker aren’t revealed until much later in one of the many plot twists from Lapena.

Raleigh admits to his Parents Olivia and Paul that he has been breaking into random homes in the neighborhood. He tell them that he doesn’t steal anything, but he does hack into the owner’s computers and sends fake emails from their accounts.

Paul like any parent sees the need to employ an attorney since their son broke the law. Even though his wife agrees, she takes it upon herself to type out anonymous notes of apology to be left in plain white envelopes. In this letters Olivia warns the owners Raleigh broke into to be more careful with their computer security .

Meanwhile, things get sticky when Amanda Pierce’s car is found at the bottom of a nearby lake with her body stuffed into the trunk. The local medical examiner indicates that Amanda suffered blunt-force trauma to her head, most likely with a hammer, prior to being placed inside her vehicle. Now, Detectives Webb and Moen have a brutal homicide to unravel.

Suspicion immediately falls on Paul but with neither motive nor opportunity, the police are forced to cast their net wider, and soon various males in the neighborhood find themselves under investigation, to the horror of their wives and mothers.

Each man, each boy is hiding something; each wife, each mother is determined to protect her menfolk. But just what lengths will they all go to, to keep their secrets safe?

Expert plotting and perfect pacing keeps the tension racked high in this story. Characters are drawn in shades of dark and light, some more likeable than others; all very believable; all perhaps capable of murder…