Someone We Know

Someone We Know by Shari Lapena is a standalone domestic thriller published in July 2019, her fourth novel and a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller following An Unwanted Guest.

Olivia Sharpe's son Raleigh has a problem. Not a teenage-awkwardness problem or a grades problem - a breaking-into-the-neighbours'-houses problem. He's been slipping into empty homes across their quiet upstate New York suburb while people are out, not to steal anything, just to test himself. And to get into their computers. Mortified and unable to tell her husband Paul, who she knows will try to bury it, Olivia writes a series of anonymous apology letters and delivers them quietly to the affected addresses. It is, she tells herself, the right thing to do. What she doesn't know when she does it is that one of the houses on Raleigh's list belongs to Robert and Amanda Pierce. And Amanda Pierce has just been found murdered in the boot of her submerged car.

Raleigh's fingerprints are now in a crime scene. Whatever he saw on Amanda's computer suddenly matters enormously. And Olivia - who sent an anonymous letter to a man whose wife was being murdered around the time it was delivered - is in a far more complicated position than she bargained for when she sat down to do the decent thing.

What makes this a distinctive entry in Lapena's catalogue is how much wider the net of Dark Secrets is cast than in her earlier, more narrowly focused domestic work. The suburb of Aylesford is an adultery merry-go-round, with the Obsession & Desire underlying almost every marriage on the street gradually coming to light as the murder investigation drags each household into the open. Amanda's death pulls multiple men - all of whom had reason to want her quiet - under simultaneous suspicion, and the Deception each of their wives is also managing adds layer after layer of motive to an already crowded field.

Lapena tells the story across Multiple POV chapters, moving between Olivia, her neighbours, the investigating detectives, and the occasional chilling fragment from the killer's own perspective. The effect is pleasingly disorienting - readers accumulate information faster than any single character does, which makes watching everyone's assumptions collide with the slowly assembling truth one of the novel's real pleasures. The short, punchy chapters Lapena deploys to maintain pace are at their most effective here, and the propulsive quality readers consistently praise in her work is well in evidence.

The Murder Mystery resolves through Mystery and Secrets Revealed that expose just how many people on this one quiet street have been living lives entirely at odds with the ones they present to their neighbours, and the Twist Ending lands with Lapena's characteristic double structure - a revelation that turns out not to be the last one. Reception has been mixed on whether the sheer volume of adultery and suspects serves the story or dilutes it, but fans of suburban paranoia and fast, twist-driven Domestic Suspense consistently rate this among her most enjoyable.