Someone We Know: A Novel

“She puts it down to his being sixteen. Sixteen-year-old boys are murder.”

Olivia Sharpe consoles herself with the thought that her son Raleigh’s laziness and immaturity may be part of a passing phase, that in a couple of years his “prefrontal cortex” will have fully developed and he will have better impulse control. The author’s sly joke is in the word “murder,” which looks ahead to the mystery’s resolution: the impulse killing of Amanda Pierce by another 16-year-old boy, Adam Newell. At this point in the story, Olivia’s turn of phrase also plants a suggestion that Raleigh may have some involvement in the opening murder, introducing him as a suspect.

“His mind seizes. He can’t answer that. If he tells her whose house he was in last night, she’ll completely lose it. He can’t bear to think of what the consequences of that might be.”

Raleigh’s panic over what he did the night before, and his lie to his mother about it, introduces another mystery. It suggests that, whether or not he was involved in the murder of the young woman, he is not quite the “good boy” his mother believes him to be.

“What, she asks herself, is the civil, decent thing to do? What will help Raleigh learn from this? What will assuage her own guilt? […] ‘I think Raleigh should go to these people and apologize.’”

Olivia, who thinks of others’ well-being before her own and guides herself by a code of decency and morality rather than self-interest, reveals herself to be more principled than most of the other characters. If her son has been hacking into her neighbors’ computers and sending emails from their accounts, she thinks they should be informed. Her husband, however, thinks only of the legal ramifications for Raleigh. Had Olivia been allowed to follow her principles, without her husband’s interference, then Carmine Torres would not have become obsessed with the break-in and would not have been murdered.

“Sinking down onto the bottom stair, he reads the letter again. Some teenager, messing about. He can’t believe it. […] He sits for a long time, thinking he might have a problem.”

Up to this point, Robert Pierce has seemed genuinely concerned about his wife’s disappearance. Here, his reaction to Olivia’s anonymous letter reveals that he has guilty secrets, perhaps concerning his wife’s death.

“He’s a teenager. They’re stupid. They don’t think. They do whatever seems like a good idea at any given moment.”

Glenda Newell counsels her friend Olivia not to worry too much about her teenage son’s snooping in other people’s houses, since misdeeds of that sort can be chalked up to teenage impulsiveness, not necessarily a long-term maladjustment. However, as will later be revealed, Glenda speaks from bitter experience about the mindless impulses of some teenagers, namely her own son, whose violent crime makes Raleigh’s misdeeds seem mild indeed.

“That’s what comes from trying to live ethically, from trying to do what’s right in a crazy, cynical world that doesn’t give a shit about doing the right thing. […] Instead it seems to be all about not getting caught, about getting away with it.”

After talking to her son’s lawyer, who has strongly advised against any apology or admission of his crimes, Olivia begins to question the wisdom of her act of conscience: sending anonymous letters of apology to her sons’ victims, none of whom knew that someone had broken into their homes. Nonetheless, she continues to feel that she did the morally sound thing. Her firmly held belief that crimes should be confessed to, not covered up—and her worry that Raleigh will take the wrong message from their defense of him—reveals her to be the novel’s closest thing to a moral center.

“That was the thing about them, so much of their marriage went on beneath the surface. They didn’t talk about things. They didn’t fight. Instead they played games.”

Robert Pierce, who never confronted his wife about his discovery of her burner phone, reflects on the artificiality of their marriage, whose placid, even enviable, façade hid deception and adultery on both sides. And, as later events bear out, he and Amanda were hardly alone in this: Their neighbors Becky, Larry, and Keith also concealed extramarital affairs. By the novel’s close, the full extent of Robert’s and Amanda’s “games” is still unknown, since Robert’s panic over the disappearance of the burner phone suggests that it contains incriminating evidence against himself.

“Of all the shitty luck! How was she to know, when she slept with her handsome next-door neighbor—only twice, as it turns out—that it would all come spilling out because his wife would be murdered and he would become the center of a police investigation?”

Becky Harris reveals her (almost comical) self-centeredness with these thoughts, which bemoan her own misfortunes, rather than Amanda’s or Robert’s, once news of the brutal murder comes out. The “spilling” of her affair seems to be the only source of remorse for her, aside from her possible regret over not having slept with her neighbor more often—as the phrase “as it turns out” implies.

“We all wear masks. We all have something to hide at one point or another. He wants to know what Robert Pierce might be hiding.”

Detective Webb’s private thoughts foreground one of the novel’s core themes, that of secrets, big and small, harbored by seemingly respectable, ordinary, even bland members of a community. In the suburbs, these secrets may be more easily hidden from neighbors than in the city, due to the privacy afforded by yards and detached houses. But Webb’s observation suggests that everyone, no matter who they are or where they live, has had things in their life that they have tried to conceal.

“He’s been avoiding her. He used her, rather shamelessly. It doesn’t bother him that much. She was awfully easy to seduce.”

Robert Pierce, reflecting on his affair with his married neighbor Becky Harris, shows that he took the relationship rather less seriously than she did. Whereas Becky feels that she might be “in love” with Robert, he regards her rather cynically as an “easy” conquest, perhaps just the latest of many. Being exceptionally handsome, and an unloving husband, he may have slept with other married women in Aylesford; his wife may even have catalogued these affairs on her burner phone, adding to his worries.

“But if there’s anyone she can trust with this, it’s Glenda. She can tell Glenda, but not her own husband. What does that say about her marriage?”

Olivia joins the ranks of Aylesford residents who hide things from their spouses—in her case, it’s because of the two anonymous letters of apology she sent, which has led a neighbor (Carmine) to suspect her son in the break-ins. Ironically, she puts her trust in Glenda, perhaps the least-trustworthy person in the novel. Olivia’s warnings to her about Carmine Torres’s cleverness will be a factor in Glenda’s decision to murder Carmine.

“‘That’s the worst thing about being a parent,’ Glenda says, ‘not knowing if you’re doing the right thing, whether you should step in or step back. Our parents just ignored us. Maybe that was better.’”

Again, in the context of later developments, these words will prove darkly ironic. Glenda offers them as commiseration for Olivia, who is distraught over her son’s break-ins and her own cover-up of it; but she is clearly thinking of her own son’s brutal murder of a young woman and her extreme and continuing efforts to conceal it. At this point, she (perhaps) wishes that she had just stepped back and called the police. However, she clearly feels it is too late now, and soon her complicity will draw her even deeper into crime, namely, another murder. But all of these revelations lie ahead: At this stage of the story, Glenda appears to be just a sympathetic, supportive friend with no agenda of her own.

“‘The police don’t have Raleigh’s prints on file,’ Olivia says, her voice tense. ‘They can’t connect Raleigh to the break-ins.’ Surely they can’t prove anything against Raleigh?”

Olivia, too, has fallen into the unique tunnel vision of those with guilty secrets, which weighs each new fact solely by its possible damage to the cover-up. Here, she does not even consider that an unidentified set of prints in Amanda Pierce’s house might jeopardize the investigation of her murder; she cares only for her son’s safety from prosecution for breaking and entering.

“In spite of her staunch denial to Olivia, she spends a lot of time wondering if Larry’s insistence that nothing of consequence had happened between him and Amanda could possibly be true.”

Again, Becky Harris serves as a somewhat comical foil for the other women in the novel. Her husband has confessed to having oral sex with Amanda Pierce in his office, and she feels this is “nothing of consequence.” Possibly, of course, she is merely weighing it against her own act of unfaithfulness: sleeping twice with Robert Pierce and falling “a little bit in love” with him (83).

“Webb thinks the killer is quite likely someone they have already met.”

One of the conventions of the classic whodunnit is a limited pool of suspects: Usually, the (unknown) murderer appears fairly early—and often—in the story, so readers will have a chance to sift through the clues and match their wits with the detectives in solving the mystery. In some whodunnits, the pool of suspects is cleverly limited by geography—most famously in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, which is set on a small island. Here, Detective Webb more or less assures the reader that the culprit will be “someone we know”—not an unknown person with no connection to the other characters. However, the wording turns out to be a slight misdirection, since the killer, Adam Newell, though a recurring character, has had no contact with the detectives.

“She doesn’t really believe that he harmed Amanda, but it wouldn’t hurt him to think she does. She gave up her career. She spent her best years keeping house and raising children for this man, while he was out making a good living. She should get what’s coming to her.”

Becky Harris, like her neighbors the Pierces, plays her own little “games,” using Amanda’s murder to put additional pressure on her straying husband, who is a suspect in the case. She manages to wrest a confession from Larry that he had been carrying on with Amanda for several weeks, which will potentially help her in a divorce proceeding. Becky, like many wives, gave up her career to marry and raise children, and is now in her mid- to late-forties, with few prospects of becoming a big earner; in the case of a divorce, she needs as much leverage as possible, especially since she herself was having an affair with Robert Pierce.

“It feels great—hacking into someone else’s system makes him feel powerful, like he has control over something. He doesn’t feel like he has much control over his own life.”

Raleigh Sharpe puts his finger on the special allure that computer hacking (and other invasions of privacy) holds for some young people, who may feel a lack of control over their everyday lives. Additionally, the violence of the wording (“hacking into someone else’s system”) evokes the brutal slaying of Amanda Pierce, hinting that her murder may also be the work of a teenager who, like Raleigh, feels frustrated by a home life in which he does not exercise much power.

“‘But if we make a visit to your aunt, she’ll confirm that you were there that night?’ […] ‘Well, I don’t know,’ he says. ‘You see, her memory is going. She’s got quite bad dementia, too—so she’s liable to get a bit mixed up. She won’t remember a visit from three weeks ago.’”

Paul Sharpe tells the detectives he was with his aunt at the presumed time of Amanda’s murder, but admits that she cannot corroborate his story. Similarly, Larry Harris cannot prove that he stayed at his work conference throughout the weekend, since the outdoor lot where he parked does not have security cameras. Typically, the suspects in a whodunnit will all lack alibis, to keep the reader guessing until the very last pages.

“The tech then sprays the area around the sink and it lights up, too. But as they proceed, the biggest area where blood has been scrubbed clean—at least to the human eye—is at the back of the kitchen on the floor in front of the windows that face the lake.”

The use of luminol reveals the Sharpe cabin in the Catskills as the probable scene of the murder. Besides the signs of massive bleeding, the location of the blood corresponds with the prologue’s description of the slaying of Amanda Pierce: a kitchen with two large windows. This discovery seems, at first, to narrow the pool of suspects down to the Sharpes; but, in true whodunnit fashion, other suspects will turn out to have a connection with the cabin as well.

“But Carmine focuses her eyes on Adam and says, ‘Did you tell your mom that I saw you the other night?’”

Carmine Torres, who has seen Adam Newell stumble drunkenly through her neighborhood late at night, cannot resist threatening him with her knowledge when she sees him in the convenience store with his mother. Unfortunately for her, she does not clarify for Glenda Newell what exactly she saw, leaving the impression that she witnessed something more incriminating. Her offhand remark, misunderstood by Glenda, leads to her death.

“Suddenly Glenda knows it must be true. Hidden files. How could she have been so stupid, so blind? She shakes her head, she can’t even speak. She wants to kill him.”

Occasionally, a whodunnit will “cheat” in its narrative or presentation of clues. For instance, the author may appear to exonerate one of the suspects through actions or private thoughts that, in retrospect, contradict the character’s own knowledge or psychology. Here, Glenda Newell “suddenly” realizes that her husband has had an affair with Amanda Pierce and has even emailed her from his family’s shared computer. The only problem is that Glenda has already known this for weeks; it is the reason for her son’s murder of Amanda, which she helped cover up. This disingenuous look into Glenda’s thoughts seeks to bolster the reader’s trust in her as a naïve, deceived wife, making the final twist—her close involvement in both murders—more shocking.

“‘I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw her car was gone. I tried to open the door but it was locked. I got the—’ He stops suddenly.”

Keith Newell, who suspects members of his own family in the murder of Amanda, misspeaks by accidentally telling the detectives the truth: that he found the Sharpes’ cabin locked, and (he implies) the spare key in its usual hiding place. His slipup allows the detectives to narrow their list of suspects to the few who knew about the spare key: the Sharpes and the Newells.

“She realizes now—too late—that she should have told Keith the truth. […] They should have gotten their stories straight. They could have protected each other. But that’s the thing—she never told Keith the truth because she couldn’t be sure he would protect her.”

Confronted by the detectives with her husband’s lies about the key, Glenda’s thoughts, for the first time, partially reveal her guilt. As with the Pierces’ marriage, there have been gaps of trust and communication between her and Keith, and only too late does she learn how determined he was to protect her and their son.