No One Can Know by Kate Alice Marshall

The author of What Lies in the Woods returns with a novel about three sisters, two murders, and too many secrets to count.

Emma hasn't told her husband much about her past. He knows her parents are dead and she hasn't spoken to her sisters in years. Then they lose their apartment, her husband gets laid off, and Emma discovers she's pregnant―right as the bank account slips into the red.

That's when Emma confesses that she has one more asset: her parents' house, which she owns jointly with her estranged sisters. They can't sell it, but they can live in it. But returning home means that Emma is forced to reveal her secrets to her husband: that the house is not a run-down farmhouse but a stately mansion, and that her parents died there.

Were murdered.

And that some people say Emma did it.

Emma and her sisters have never spoken about what really happened that night. Now, her return to the house may lure her sisters back, but it will also crack open family and small-town secrets lots of people don’t want revealed. As Emma struggles to reconnect with her old family and hold together her new one, she begins to realize that the things they have left unspoken all these years have put them in danger again.

Hardcover, 336 pages

Published January 23, 2023

by Flatiron Books

2.5/5 stars

This is one of those books that came to my attention through social media buzz. After reading the blurb, about three sisters recently orphaned after the murder of their parents, I was intrigued.

It’s been many years since Emma‘s parents were brutally murdered, and there has been no arrest. In this case she is suspect number one. Due to financial circumstances Emma and her husband move back into the family home that was abandoned since the murders.  It is here that she reconnects with her estranged sisters. While the town believes her to be the murderer, there’s definitely someone who does not want her there.

Told from the point of view of the three sisters both in the present and the past. There were times that I found this book disjointed and the many red herrings were somewhat overwhelming. The past POV‘s would never really indicate whether the past was the day of the murders or something further back, which was jarring.

As for the mystery and what happened that night many years ago, it wasn't till the last third of book that things picked up.  I was genuinely curious as to the outcome but having never really connected with the sisters put a damper on things.  Yes there were twists and a surprise ending which made up for the slow burn.

This book was part of my 2024 Reading Off My Shelf Challenge