Review: ‘Someone You Know’ by Olivia Isaac-Henry ⭐⭐⭐⭐

You can trust your family, can’t you…?

Tess Piper was fourteen when her adored twin sister Edie disappeared.

She has spent the last twenty years building a life away from her fractured family, desperate to escape the shadow of the past.

Only now she needs to confront the huge hole her sister’s disappearance left in her life, because a body has been found. The police are shining a spotlight on the Piper family. And secrets are about to surface.

After all, it’s common knowledge that more often than not these crimes are committed by someone close to the victim. Someone they trust. Someone they know…

What really happened to Edie Piper?

Thank you to NetGalley, Avon books and Olivia Isaac-Henry for the chance to read this novel in exchange for an honest review.

This thriller was a quick and gripping read. From early on there seemed to be a glaringly obvious culprit. But was this the case or was the author deliberately trying to mislead us so we are surprised by the truth? I vacillated between the two possibilities many times during this book and later on when I considered other suspects.

The dual timelines with different narrators works well for the story. In the present day we have Tess narrating and see how she remembers her sister, events leading to and surrounding her disappearance, and how it shaped her life and still affects her to this day. In the flashback chapters our narrator is Edie. This allows us to get to know her as more than a body that’s now been found and learn who she was, what she thought from her own perspective instead of through Tess’s eyes. The difference in how Tess remembers things and how Edie viewed things at the time, and how very different the two girls were, adds a greater dimension to the story and gives us more clues as to who could have killed her than if we had just had the one narrator.

One of the themes that runs through the book is the family’s mistrust of the police. This stems from how close family members were suspected back when Edie vanished and things they said were twisted. Determined to find out what happened to her twin Tess begins to investigate for herself, only for her family to dissuade her from doing that too. Could there be more to both these things? Are they actually trying to stop her from finding out a truth they’ve been hiding all these years?

Full of twists and turns this was a thriller that repeatedly surprised me. I recommend this to anyone looking for a good readable thriller.

Out now.