Jessica Strawser | NOT THAT I COULD TELL

Plot (via Goodreads):

When a group of neighborhood women gathers, wine in hand, around a fire pit where their backyards meet one Saturday night, most of them are just ecstatic to have discovered that their baby monitors reach that far. It’s a rare kid-free night, and they’re giddy with it. They drink too much, and the conversation turns personal.

By Monday morning, one of them is gone.

Everyone knows something about everyone else in the quirky small Ohio town of Yellow Springs, but no one can make sense of the disappearance. Kristin was a sociable twin mom, college administrator, and doctor’s wife who didn’t seem all that bothered by her impending divorce—and the investigation turns up more questions than answers, with her husband, Paul, at the center. For her closest neighbor, Clara, the incident triggers memories she thought she’d put behind her—and when she’s unable to extract herself from the widening circle of scrutiny, her own suspicions quickly grow. But the neighborhood’s newest addition, Izzy, is determined not to jump to any conclusions—especially since she’s dealing with a crisis of her own.

As the police investigation goes from a media circus to a cold case, the neighbors are forced to reexamine what’s going on behind their own closed doors—and to ask how well anyone really knows anyone else. 

Review:

After reading the synopsis to NOT THAT I COULD TELL, I knew this one was something I had to read. And I wanted to love it, I really did. I wanted to love this novel so badly. I liked it, I didn't love it and I definitely didn't hate it. Let me tell you why.

I LOVED how this one started. It was mysterious and ominous, creating enough of a panic in me and the characters I had grown to love that I really found myself too into this novel from the beginning. The first 100 pages were really intriguing to me as I loved Strawser's writing and the characters were really fascinating to read about. The novel is atmospheric and comforting at times, the kind of novel you must cozy up with and really take your time reading. 

That being said, pages 100-200 fell really flat for me. Like I said, I loved the writing and the characters, but I was feeling that this one was more contemporary fiction compared to the mystery/thriller genre that the plot had been marketed as. I would compare these pages to some episodes of Desperate Housewives and I don't mean that in a negative way. It's more or less that the mystery was on the back burner and we really spend a lot of time getting to know these characters and watching them deal with the dramas of their every day lives and that the mysterious disappearance of their friend was kind of an inconvenience to them at times with the detective showing up. 

Around page 200 or so, things started to pick up as our storyline wrapped up. I absolutely loved the brutality and the darkness of the ending. It was shocking, clever, and a little discomforting compared to the lighter nature of some of the other scenes earlier on in the novel. And while I didn't enjoy this one as much as I wanted to, I did like the eerie chapters in between the different perspective chapters that kind of provide the reader with breadcrumbs of information that explains the ending rather fantastically. This novel in my opinion was good. The writing was exceptional, I really enjoyed the characters, and the ending just really worked for me, but at the end of the day the pacing and some of the multiple storylines in the middle just really didn't hit the mark for me. I will say though, the last chapter of this one definitely made me glad I didn't choose to give up on it. 

Special thanks to St. Martin's Press for providing me with this copy in exchange for my honest review.

Rating: 3/5