What You Did

Product Information

AFOJFOJFOJ WHYYY!! ??? I absolutely loved Claire McGowan's writing in I Know You and What You Did, so naturally I was pumped af to grab her latest off NetGalley. The start was promising with Mary's raw af account of being a mom of two young kids with a bum ass husband. Her daughter, Audrey, was the uncontested star of this book—which is why I gave this two stars instead of one. An intriguing premise that didn’t quite deliver for me….Can the eye witness accounts of two sleep deprived witnesses be reliable? Mary is a mother of two children under the age of two. She feels like she hasn’t slept at all since her second was born. In ‘Mum of the Year’ fashion, Mary occasionally brings her nursing three-month old son and her continually screaming two-year-old daughter who either speaks Caveman “HOT, MUMMY!” or beyond her years sentences “WHO IS THIS MAN, MUMMY?” along on her potentially dangerous snooping. When they aren’t with her, she’s shuffled them off to her friends to continue investigating the disappearance of a girl she doesn’t know with her neighbor she’s just met, while continually whining about her mom guilt. Now twenty years later her innocence is again questioned and with growing evidence the police are starting to circle. Could this be a dreadful coincidence or is someone trying to ruin her life.

As for the investigation, Mary and Tim weren’t very good at it, they just kept stumbling across situations, and it was frustrating that the police were doing nothing. As for the conclusion and what had happened to Samantha, this just fell flat and certainly wasn’t worth persevering with the book for. But after about a dozen of them, I kind of started to wish I never had to read another thriller, ever again. I felt the end was a lil bit of a reach... Maybe more than a lil bit. Overall, I was hooked by the exploration of familicide and challenging the theory "where there's smoke, there's fire." When Karen staggers in from the garden, bleeding and traumatised, she claims that she has been assaulted—by Ali’s husband, Mike. Ali must make a split-second decision: who should she believe? Her horrified husband, or her best friend? With Mike offerThey talk & realise that the person they both saw looked like a local missing teenager, Samantha. Her family have been on the news recently begging for her safe return, & Tim & Mary fear she has been kidnapped & is being held in the empty house on Cliveden Road. The two of them report what they have seen to the police but nothing much comes of it, so they decide to continue their own investigation. For Mary it's a chance to have something for herself outside of motherhood, whilst for Tim, it's the first time he's been interesting in anything (apart from stalking his ex-wife) for a long time. Can they trust each other though, & given their respective issues, can they even trust themselves?

Ireland in the 1990s seemed a safe place for women. With the news dominated by the Troubles, it was easy to ignore non-political murders and sexual violence, to trust that you weren’t going to be dragged into the shadows and killed. But beneath the surface, a far darker reality had taken hold. She feels like history is repeating itself. Twenty years, when she was known as Casey; as a young nanny, the family she worked for were brutally murdered, all the evidence pointed to her and she went to prison. She narrowly escaped the death penalty and managed to free herself. The party should have been perfect: six couples from the same baby group, six newborns, a luxurious house. But not everything has gone to plan, and while some are here to celebrate, others have sorrows to drown. When someone falls from the balcony of the house, the secrets and conflicts within the group begin to spill out … That said, it was an interesting idea and it did keep me reading as I wanted to know what had happened - though the finale was a little flat; I was expecting a big twist but there were no real surprises at the end.

Advance Praise

McGowan delivers a hugely relevant novel for the post #MeToo era and a searing indictment of how far we still have to go. A story that is like a fine wine laced with poison—it’ll slay you." - L V Hay In the present, Rachel stumbles upon a body and runs. Was it a coincidence? Is she as innocent as she seems? And what really happened 20 years ago? I've read every book by Claire McGowan and I was strongly anticipating "I know you" and I wasn't disappointed. It was well worth the wait.

But words are nothing compared to what her policeman father, PJ, is dealing with. The hot summer is simmering with violence and the entire force is focused on finding a bomber leaving devices on the routes of Orange parades. McGowan reveals an Ireland not of leprechauns and craic but of outdated social and sexual mores, where women and their bodies were of secondary importance to perceived propriety and misguided politics―a place of well-buttoned lips and stony silence, inadequate police and paramilitary threat. When Karen staggers in from the garden, bleeding and traumatised, she claims that she has been assaulted—by Ali’s husband, Mike. Ali must make a split-second decision: who should she believe? Her horrified husband, or her best friend? With Mike offering a very different version of events, Ali knows one of them is lying—but which? And why? Other than that, I Know You was a nice, engaging thriller that I’m sure many people would enjoy very much. With no one to turn to and the police set on pinning her as the perp, she undertakes an investigation of her own and discovers that life has a bad way of repeating itself.A few things I did NOT like about this book, please note that this is my opinion based on things to which I relate to and feel targeted with: Claire McGowan is an accomplished writer of thrillers and the premise of ‘Are You Awake’ sounds promising. Two people, unable to sleep for very different reasons, believe that they see a missing girl being assaulted in the middle of the night. The police do not appear very interested. Mary and Tim decide to become amateur detectives when they think they see a missing girl in an abandoned house. Their suspicions are all based on not very much, and they put their lives in danger because they can’t sleep and are bored. The second, tells the story of Rachel, in present day England. Rachel works at a dog shelter; she lives on her own and is having an affair with a married man called Alex. Their relationship is full of passion and she is madly in love with him. Alex has not divorced his wife Anna at this stage, and Anna is not happy Rachel is seeing her husband. Again, things go pear-shaped. Enough said. The one highlight from my point about this plot was the inclusion of the media trial and the social media condemnation which usually takes place when a person is accused of a crime (whether or not they are guilty!)