Another right-in-this-moment new thriller, Melinda Leigh’s You Can Tell Me takes on the potential downsides of true crime reporting. Crime authors have given some memorable depictions of the excesses and dangers of this current societal preoccupation. I’m thinking of Paul Cleave’s The Pain Tourist or Lori Roy’s The Final Episode among numerous others. Leigh is here with her own take on this popular subgenre.
You Can Tell Me takes place in fictional town of Scarlett Falls in Upstate New York, with the picturesque Adirondack Mountains as a backdrop. It begins with the abduction of true crime author Olivia Cruz but doesn’t dwell on this experience. Instead, Leigh’s focus is on the flashbacks and frightening memories she still has three years later. At this point, her friend Zoe March, a true crime podcaster, suggests featuring Olivia’s experience in her podcast called You Won’t Believe This. It will be painful, but Olivia hopes talking about it will help her lay those demons to rest.
She’s fairly safe, actually, with former police detective, now private investigator, Lincoln Sharp, practically living with her. And, game for tackling any tricky situation is her internet-savvy niece, Nicki. But when she arrives to meet Zoe for the interview her friend is a no-show. Dylan, Zoe’s considerably younger husband, a self-involved fitness guru, says she didn’t come home the night before.
On Zoe’s phone, they find a single-word message she was sent just before she disappeared: ‘Run.’ It seems she has. But Dylan won’t be an ally as they try to find Zoe; they don’t trust him.
Olivia locates a storage unit Zoe had rented many miles away, which no one knew about. She and Nicki break in and discover the only thing in it is Zoe’s beloved Jeep. It must have contained another vehicle, unknown to them, that she’s using for the next leg of her escape. She’d had that storage unit for over a decade, so her flight is obviously not a spur-of-the-moment decision. Something on the horizon has threatened her for a very long time.
Chapters written from Zoe’s point of view have her traveling late into the night to a remote destination. These alternate with Olivia, Lincoln and Nicki trying to figure out Zoe’s next moves, with precious little to go on. The police are not too interested at this point because there’s no evidence a crime has been committed, and adults can take off, by and large, when and where they want to. No law has been broken. Luckily, the cops don’t know about Olivia, Lincoln, and Nicki’s various break-ins.
Olivia’s potentially most promising hunch is that Zoe has gone off to probe into one of the two crimes she’s considering for the next season of her podcast. Investigations into unsolved murders can lead into tricky territory, and that may have occurred this time out. Perhaps Zoe kept her plans a secret because there’s competition in the true crime world, and she has to maintain her lead. That works, as a hypothesis, except for the ‘Run.’
We follow Nicki to a bar where she’s about to meet a stranger from a dating app, and whom does she see there but Dylan, hitting on a young woman, his wife missing only one day. Although Olivia has warned Nicki repeatedly about guarding her drinks in bars, and Nicki is careful, a date-rape drug gets in her drink, and she ends up in the hospital. At least some bar patrons did the right thing when they saw how sick she was and wouldn’t let her leave with the dating app guy. At this point, the novel may feel a bit like a catalogue of female victimisation, with Olivia having been kidnapped, Zoe’s apparent desperate and well-planned escape, and Nicki’s drugging.
The combination of small threads of information, smart deductions and a good understanding of Zoe’s behaviour does keep these unofficial investigators going. Lincoln’s police background and Nicki’s technical expertise contribute a great deal too. The weather, however, does not cooperate. Leigh describes a storm whose fury makes the actions of every character in the story riskier and more difficult.
While I enjoyed the adventure component in this book, and liked the plucky main characters, the dialog was frequently stiff and unrealistic. In describing Zoe or Olivia’s thoughts in various circumstances, there was a tendency to revisit thoughts already expressed or ones that were rather obvious. Also, I was mystified by the comment that Olivia’s abduction in the past turned out to be a PR stunt by her agent. What? Doesn’t that change everything she feels about it? Laws were broken, so what happened to the genius who dreamed it up? I can’t tell you. It’s never mentioned again. Perhaps this was the topic of a previous book, but the information just hung there. I’ll note that mine was an advance reader’s copy, which is subject to some revision and, if it were my choice, I’d delete that information. It’s too confusing.
Still, if you like an interesting adventure with characters you’ll root for, You Can Tell Me certainly fills the bill.
Also see Murder Most Haunted by Emma Mason for a humorous take on podcasting.
Montlake
Print/Kindle
£8.54
CFL Rating: 3 Stars
