Murder tears a small town apart in Treadway's mystery
A girl is murdered in a small town. Her friends and family — who make up a sizable chunk of the town’s inhabitants — are thrown into turmoil; some of them know more than they’re letting on.
It’s an old story, one with infinite variations. Twin Peaks is one of them; How Will I Know You? (Grand Central, 405 pp., **½ out of four stars), a new novel by Jessica Treadway, is another.
The book opens ”two days after a snowshoeing couple literally stumbled across Joy’s body in the woods at the edge of the pond” in rural upstate New York. Joy Enright was a high school senior, the only child of Susanne, a professor at the local art college, and Gil, a struggling contractor. She had perfect SAT scores and artistic aspirations, but of course, that was never the whole story.
The novel takes place, for the most part, in two alternating time frames, designated “Before” and “After” Joy’s murder. The last three sections are labeled, rather gratingly, “After (Further),” “During” and “After — The Last.”
There are four primary point-of-view characters — Harper, Joy’s best friend; Susanne; Martin, a black art student fingered for the murder; and Tom, a rescue diver/store owner/sometime private investigator/son-in-law to the interim chief of police (very small town). There is a lot of bouncing around that is sometimes confusing and bad for the pace — Treadway’s penchant for backstory and flashback doesn’t help.
The plot, at least, is relatively simple — a past and a present, converging on a tragic death, with the requisite twists and turns. The drama comes from the personal relationships and community dynamics tested and exposed as a result of Joy’s murder. “That’s what I hate about living in a podunk town like this,” says one of Joy’s classmates. “Everything overlaps with everything else. Everybody overlaps.”
These explorations are sometimes clumsy. Racism is a pervasive theme, but Treadway says little you wouldn’t guess once you know about the racist police chief and the black suspect booked on shaky evidence. Martin is a likable character, but he loses believability when he pauses suspenseful narration for long asides about being watched while shopping in record stores.
But Treadway writes convincingly about longing and pain, the ups and downs of parenthood, marriage and friendship. The book is peppered with lovely, well-observed moments. This one, for example, of grief and blame: "When Gil came home, Susanne was still slumped on the floor in the kitchen, and they both knew he would step over her without speaking."
How Will I Know You? shines in these flashes of rawness, when the town and its inhabitants reckon with the shattering horror of Joy’s murder. The novel may be flawed, but some of its pieces are sharp and beautiful, and they lodge themselves deep.
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Steph Cha is author of the Juniper Song mysteries.