I'll Never Tell
by Catherine McKenzie
What happened to Amanda Holmes?
Twenty years ago, she washed up on shore in a rowboat with a gash to the head after an overnight at Camp Macaw. No one was ever charged with a crime.
Now, the MacAllister children are all grown up. After their parents die suddenly, they return to Camp to read the will and decide what to do with the prime real estate it's sitting on. Ryan, the oldest, wants to sell. Margo, the family's center, hasn't made up her mind. Mary has her own horse farm to run, and believes in leaving well-enough alone. Kate and Liddie—the twins—have opposing views. And Sean Booth, the family groundskeeper, just hopes he still has a home when all is said and done.
But then the will is read and they learn that it's much more complicated than a simple vote. Until they unravel the mystery of what happened to Amanda, they can't move forward. Any one of them could have done it, and all of them are hiding key pieces of the puzzle. Will they work together to solve the mystery, or will their suspicions and secrets finally tear the family apart?
My Rating:
Favorite Quotes:
She leaned toward Liddie. She smelled like her father used to, a mix of coffee and marijuana. “Waking and baking these days?”
“Have you ever thought about what they must’ve been like before all of us? … I think about it. They met. They fell in love. They were regular people once.” “And what? We made them into irregular people?”
They always got the leftovers. The things left in the lost and found. If Liddie wrote a biography of her childhood, it would be called Nothing Was Ever Mine.
That was the bargain of being a twin. You didn’t need to talk about it; you simply knew that sometime in the not too distant future, you’d be living together in some old-age home, dressed alike the way you’d been as children.
He always smelled the same— slightly refrigerated. It was a smell Mary liked because it meant coolness to her. Not in a fashion sense but in the temperature way. He was calm, steady.
Of everyone in their family, the person she’d understood the least had been her mother. When Kate thought of her, she always seemed diaphanous. Like one of those Instagram filters had been applied to her, washing her out, smoothing away the lines. Nothing ever seemed to stick to her, not criticism or her children, not even her husband. She simply floated around, photographing it all, removed.
My Review:
Quite a clever gal, that Catherine McKenzie! This well-crafted mystery was full of simply explained yet brilliantly placed twists and turns that kept me on edge and off-center. The storylines were highly eventful and ingeniously paced with tension and intrigue steadily ratcheting up the scale, and I was sucking it all in like the latest and greatest vacuum on the market. I enjoyed the shrewdly discerning tale as much as the skill and cunning in the telling of it.
This family was well beyond quirky, they were each oddly peculiar and self-absorbed. I didn’t care for any of them by the time I finished the book, yet I was driven to know all about them. I had great empathy for the stalwart employee and held my breath for him and cringed each time evidence pointed his direction. Each character was fascinatingly flawed and I enjoyed unearthing their many secrets. This was only my second time reading her work but I am eager to see what Ms. McKenzie comes up with next, she now has a rather rabid fangirl on her hands.
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a was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. A graduate of McGill in History and Law, Catherine practices law in Montreal. An avid runner and skier, she’s the author of numerous bestsellers including HIDDEN, SPIN, and SMOKE. Her works have been translated into multiple languages.
HIDDEN was a #1 Amazon bestseller and a Digital Bookworld bestseller for five weeks. SMOKE was a #1 Amazon bestseller and was named as a Best Book of October (Goodreads) and one of the Top 100 Books of 2015 (Amazon). FRACTURED was a Best Book of October 2016 (Goodreads). She is also the author of THE MURDER GAME under her pseudonym, Julie Apple (the protagonist of Fractured).
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