Gilly Macmillan | I KNOW YOU KNOW

Plot (via Goodreads):

Twenty years ago, eleven-year-olds Charlie Paige and Scott Ashby were murdered in the city of Bristol, their bodies dumped near a dog racing track. A man was convicted of the brutal crime, but decades later, questions still linger.

For his whole life, filmmaker Cody Swift has been haunted by the deaths of his childhood best friends. The loose ends of the police investigation consume him so much that he decides to return to Bristol in search of answers. Hoping to uncover new evidence, and to encourage those who may be keeping long-buried secrets to speak up, Cody starts a podcast to record his findings. But there are many people who don’t want the case—along with old wounds—reopened so many years after the tragedy, especially Charlie’s mother, Jess, who decides to take matters into her own hands.

When a long-dead body is found in the same location the boys were left decades before, the disturbing discovery launches another murder investigation. Now Detective John Fletcher, the investigator on the original case, must reopen his dusty files and decide if the two murders are linked. With his career at risk, the clock is ticking and lives are in jeopardy… 

Review:

I absolutely love Gilly Macmillan's writing. Her style is immersive and chilling, her characters are always just fantastic, and the plots to her novels are so constructive and genius. I Know You Know is no exception. But with this one, Macmillan combined an element I am seeing (and loving) in thrillers a lot lately by using a podcast to kind of tell this twisted and dark story. I read this one weeks ago and still get chills thinking of this novel.

I thought this novel knocked it right out of the park for me. Here's why - when I first saw other bloggers posting about this one the reviews were really mixed. Problem? Not at all. I went into this one with an open mind and just enjoyed the ride. You know, I want to do that with all books I read now. Not feed into the hype or let bad reviews deter me from reading what I want to read and you shouldn't either as a reader. So I dove in and I regret nothing. This novel starts off atmospherically delicious and is so chilling that I grabbed a thicker quilt. Now I will say, with the initial shocking opening the novel does slow down a bit and takes a little while for the pacing to really speed up - but, this is done for a reason. There were a lot of characters in this one initially and I did get confused at first, but I ended up really, really loving this one after the first 100 pages.

Once I got used to the characters and their storylines and kind of got a handle as to what was going on, I couldn't stop reading. I was eating up words left and right and just loving the contrast between the podcast and what was going on in that present time and how those characters were kind of brought back with the ghosts of the past. The characters in this one were fantastic to read, brilliantly written, and just devastatingly real. 

This novel is dark, harrowing, and beautifully portrayed with an ending that really shocked me. Honestly, I was happy with the ending. It was how things happen sometimes. It's not a huge twist you'd usually find in a novel, but an explanation of what happened. However, there is one moment that I just completely gasped over and honestly - it was fantastic. 

Special thanks to William Morrow for this copy in exchange for my honest review.

Rating: 4/5