Alice Feeney's messy 'I Know Who You Are' wallows in ugly thrills
Alice Feeney’s follow-up to her best-selling 2017 whodunit “Sometimes I Lie” features that inescapable staple of the modern thriller, the unreliable narrator.
In “I Know Who You Are” (Flatiron Books, 304 pp., ★½ out of four), that unreliable narrator is Aimee, an actress whose husband has disappeared after an argument. The police notice she’s not very upset about it. Is she being gaslighted? Does she drink too much? Is she a killer? Yes, to all three.
Aimee is a wounded and insecure soul, born Ciara to a poor family in Ireland. Her mother died in childbirth, and both Ciara and her alcoholic father blame her for killing her mother.
Five-year-old Ciara runs away and is kidnapped by a manipulative numbers-runner named Maggie, who renames her Aimee, after another child who died in unclear circumstances (unsolved mysteries abound in this book). Maggie proceeds to treat Ciara/Aimee with such depraved cruelty that she makes Cinderella’s stepmother look like Mother Teresa.
Two episodes, in particular, stand out: One involves a McDonald’s Happy Meal that will make the treat hard to choke down on your next trip to the drive-through, and another involves a pet hamster and a deep fryer. Need I say more?
Aimee survives life with Maggie and John, her predatory partner in crime, until a robbery attempt ends in a bloodbath. Fast forward 20 years, and Aimee is a rising actress, able to shape-shift her way through various roles – an opportunity for Feeney to weigh in on the familiar symbolism of the masks we wear each day.
Feeney is a former BBC producer who appears to have little regard for the press. An entertainment reporter who stalks Aimee is the stereotypical harpy slavering over lascivious gossip and yes, sleeping with her celebrity sources. There's one policewoman so dastardly she lacks only a mustache to twirl.
The ending isn’t a just twist, it's a triple axel Feeney fails to stick. Instead of shouting “A-ha!” when the strange strands of the plot are knitted together, the reader is more likely to say “Whaaa?” and then maybe “Ew.”
No doubt, Feeney has the storytelling and pacing skills to keep a reader paging through to see what comes next. It's just "what comes next" includes incest, child abuse and marital rape, and a story I didn't care to read.