Cover of Don't I Know You?

Don't I Know You?

Multiple lacerations and stab wounds. No evidence of forced entry. The possibility of sexual assault. Crimes such as these are almost always committed by someone the victim knows well.

Read more

In 1976 in New York City, Gina Engel was murdered in her front hall. The police believed the victim had known her attacker. But they had few suspects, and as time went on, the case remained unsolved. Yet the suspicions of those who knew Gina both intimately and from a distance continue to plague them.

Gina's son, Steven, discovered the body and caught only a fleeting glimpse of the killer as he fled. If only, he wonders again and again. As Lily Chin prepares for her upcoming wedding, her life is irrevocably changed when a mysterious woman appears to inform her of her fiance's secret life — a life that may have included Gina Engel. And more than a decade later Louise Carpanetti, the woman who received a call from the dying Gina, finally acknowledges that her own emotionally disturbed son may have committed the gruesome murder. As long as the murderer's identity remains a mystery, all three must forever call into question the nature of the people closest to them.

Don't I Know You?is an intricate and devastating psychological drama told in three separate but interconnected narratives. Together those narra-tives unfold into a mystery that absorbs and thrills, and lay out an examination of the human heart that is quietly dazzling in its emotional intelligence and elegant understatement. Shepard's vision of how a murder's effect reverberates outward inspires us to understand the limitations of intimate knowledge and the extraordinary capacities of the people we think we know best, even as it shows us how we repair those bonds and prepare ourselves to go on.

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 240 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Don't I Know You?? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Don't I Know You?. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. A Taxonomy of Barnacles Shares fiction, contemporary fiction
  2. Unquiet Ghosts Shares mystery, fiction, thriller
  3. Only Son Shares mystery, fiction, thriller
  4. Alentejo Blue Shares fiction, contemporary fiction

“People who read Don't I Know You? tend to reach for these next.”

  1. Death's Little Helpers
  2. Mazel
  3. Blood of Angels
  4. It Will Come To Me: A Novel

“If you want more of the same (mystery), start with these.”

  1. The Fourth Angel
  2. The Shadow of Your Smile
  3. You Belong To Me
  4. The Sniper's Wife

“If it was the thriller that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. The Forbidden Book
  2. Shotgun Lullaby
  3. Confessions of a Deathmaiden
  4. The Anger Meridian

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Uncle Jack
  2. Q is for Quarry
  3. Pointing From The Grave: A True Story of Murder and DNA
  4. The Jackal Man