No One Knows by JT Ellison
Thriller
Hardcover, 368 pages
Published March 22nd, 2016 by Gallery Books
Note: A copy was provided by the publisher for
my honest review as part of the She Reads blog network.
From the publisher:
The day Aubrey Hamilton’s husband is declared
dead by the state of Tennessee should bring closure so she can move on with her
life. But Aubrey doesn’t want to move on; she wants Josh back. It’s been five
years since he disappeared, since their blissfully happy marriage—they were
happy, weren’t they?—screeched to a halt and Aubrey became the prime suspect in
his disappearance. Five years of emptiness, solitude, loneliness, questions.
Why didn’t Josh show up at his friend’s bachelor party? Was he murdered? Did he
run away? And now, all this time later, who is the mysterious yet strangely
familiar figure suddenly haunting her new life?
I picked
this one up without knowing to much about it. I knew it was a She Reads pick,
and I glanced at the Goodreads rating. It seemed okay so I dove in.
I was
sucked in from the get go. I found the structure to the story and the way it
was told engaging and interesting. It kept me wanting to know more about the
characters and see what would unfold next.
No One Knows is told in bits and pieces. Some from the
past, from the present, jumping all around in the timeline. While Aubrey is our
main character, we also get chapters from others’ perspectives from time to
time. In some books, a structure like this might frustrate me. Here, however, I
found it worked. Elliston just keeps giving you one piece of the puzzle at a
time.
Unfortunately,
as the story went on, I found myself less and less engaged.
Here’s the
thing. I really love a good thriller. But the problem is good thrillers (to my
taste) are hard to find. Enjoyable thrillers? Sure, those are everywhere. If
you have no problem suspending your disbelief—pretty much constantly—then you
won’t have too much trouble.
But.
But I can’t.
I can to a certain extent. I can here and there, if, on the whole, the story is
more believable than not. But when there are continual and unnecessary plot
twists left, right, and center, I find it hard to do much more than shake my
head.
Why can’t
the shocking, bad thing just be shocking and bad? Why does there have to be
eight hundred other layers making it more shocking and bad? That is my main pet
peeve with the thriller genre as a whole. I like my stories to be subtler.
With No One Knows, even the “aha!” moment did not hold
enough thrill for me to forgive the story’s many holes and inconsistencies. In
fact, it just threw in more.
I really
wanted to like this one. But instead of getting a complex story with
interesting characters, I was given an unnecessarily convoluted one with pieces
that just didn’t quite fit together.
Honestly, I
think this is just a type of thriller that doesn’t work for me. I’ve read many
that I’ve had similar feelings about when most other people had loved them. I
think it’s just down to your preference. If you like tons of twists and turns
and don’t plan to spend too much time thinking through the plausibility of it
all, you may like this one. Unfortunately for me it just didn’t do the trick.
For more reviews of No One Knows and the other spring She Reads selections, click here.
Storyline C
Structure/Execution
B+
Characters
B-
Writing B+
Conclusion
C
Enjoyment
C+
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Labels: Fiction, She Reads, Thriller
