What Have You Done?

What Have You Done? by Shari Lapena is a standalone thriller published in July 2024, her eighth novel and an instant New York Times bestseller. It marks a notable departure from her established domestic suburban formula, trading the marital secrets and upstate New York zip codes of earlier books for a small Vermont community, teenage protagonists, and an element no previous Lapena novel has attempted.

Nothing ever happens in Fairhill, Vermont. The teenagers drink in the old graveyard on Friday nights and tell ghost stories. The parents don't lock their front doors. Everybody knows everybody. Diana Brewer, seventeen, is found dead in a local farmer's hayfield on a Friday morning, naked and circled by vultures, and within hours the town that has never had any reason for paranoia is crawling with it. Suspicion falls first on Cameron, Diana's controlling, possessive boyfriend - too clingy, too certain they were going to the same college, too furious at the idea of her pulling away. But a Small Town with Dark Underbelly has a way of revealing that the obvious suspect is rarely the only one worth looking at, and Fairhill turns out to be holding rather more Dark Secrets than its unlocked doors suggested.

What makes this entry genuinely distinctive within Lapena's catalogue - and the element most likely to shape whether readers connect with it - is Diana herself. Following the template of The Lovely Bones, Diana narrates a strand of the novel from beyond the veil, watching over the investigation, sensing her mother's grief, and carrying a Paranormal quality the book wears lightly but consistently. It's a tonal shift from Lapena's earlier work: the detective procedural and parental anxiety of the adult characters sit alongside something closer to YA in register, and readers who came for the tight marital suspense of The Couple Next Door or An Unwanted Guest will notice the difference. Those who embrace it tend to find the Diana sections genuinely moving; those who don't find them an awkward tonal register change.

Lapena tells the story across Multiple POV chapters in her characteristic short, cliff-hanging structure, moving between Diana's grieving mother, the two teenagers closest to her, the adults in Diana's orbit who turn out to have their own Deception to protect, and the detectives working outward from the hayfield. The Coming of Age environment - teenage friendships, controlling relationships, the specific vulnerabilities of young women in small communities - gives the novel real thematic weight alongside its whodunit mechanics, and several reviewers noted the book functions as much as a study of how communities handle the murder of a young woman as it does a pure mystery.

The Mystery and Secrets Revealed build steadily toward a Twist Ending that has divided readers - some find the reveal well-planted and satisfying, others feel it raises more questions than it closes. Reception overall has been mixed-to-warm: it sits lower in the Lapena catalogue for dedicated fans of her domestic thriller work, but functions well as a different kind of fast, atmospheric small-town mystery for readers less attached to her usual formula.