Residents of the posh Upstate New York neighborhood of Deer Crossing enjoy all the amenities wealth provides. From drive-up dog-grooming to monthly botox parties, these lucky suburbanites have everything they could ever want. And one thing they don’t. Stalker Caroline Case, who wheels her infant along their streets each night with just one goal…to spy on anyone too careless or too foolish to close their window blinds.
Convinced the owners of the impressive homes are living a dream existence, the troubled new mom hopes to escape her working-class life by prying secrets from the unsuspecting. But the fairy tale twists into a nightmare when she sees something she shouldn’t. Something that shatters her illusions about the people in the privileged community she’s obsessed with, even as she begins to doubt what she saw.
As Caroline investigates the event, shocking secrets are laid bare, and nothing is as it seems. She knows she must prove something sinister occurred in Deer Crossing or risk letting someone get away with murder.
I Know She Was There is a suburban psychological thriller with plenty of tension and surprises. The book has a slow-burn start and heats up with action-packed suspense in the second half. The story follows Caroline Chase, a recently separated woman who ventures on nighttime walks in a nearby upscale neighborhood to soothe her colicky baby and innocently spy on the residents. One night, she witnesses what appears to be a woman being murdered in a second-floor window. When she reports the incident to police and the investigation turns up nothing, her history of mental health issues is raised, and everyone assumes she’s hallucinated the whole event. But Caroline knows what she saw and starts to investigate on her own, which leads her down a very dangerous path.
The story is full of interesting, complex, and flawed characters. Caroline is a very multidimensional character. Her relationship with her separated husband Tim often makes her appear unhinged, as she desperately tries to hold on to a man who no longer wants her. Caroline is constantly suspicious of people’s actions and words, even those closest to her. Mary, Caroline’s eccentric and often intoxicated neighbor, brings a lot of dark humor to the story, and her actions are very questionable. As the story is told from Caroline’s unreliable and often unhinged perspective, there are a lot of twisted inner monologues in the narrative—fortunately, they’re not repetitive and instead bring more entertainment value. As Caroline’s stress mounts with an impending divorce and the fear of losing her baby, her grip on reality begins to unravel, and she finds it difficult to trust anyone, including herself. Many of the neighborhood characters that Caroline’s been spying on have names and relations to her that she’s concocted or confused. It’s sometimes hard to keep track of it all, so it’s a great idea to jot down all the names and all the character associations to keep everyone in check!
The story is broken up into two parts. Part one establishes the key characters and the investigation that Caroline is bent on solving. With some shocking revelations presented at the start of Part Two, it becomes obvious that nothing is as it seems in this unpredictable story. The second half features a lot of suspenseful plot points culminating in a high-stakes, shocking ending that will delight popcorn thriller lovers. Whether you like Caroline or not, her fearless attitude and her willingness to lose everything to unravel the truth are extremely admirable!
It should be noted that the story has quite a bit of content that may be triggering, including mental illness, psychosis, memory loss, divorce, postpartum depression, and prescription drug and alcohol abuse. None of this content overwhelms the story but instead is deliciously woven into the complex characterization and suspenseful storytelling. The dark comedy moments in the story are well written and add another layer to the story that many readers will appreciate—especially some of the conversations between Caroline and Mary!
Overall, this is a riveting and very unpredictable psychological thriller with an unconventional premise. Readers who enjoy stories with unreliable narrators, unhinged FMCs, puzzling plot points, and jaw-dropping twists will enjoy this book! Narrator Emily Ellet does a phenomenal job creating an atmospheric listening experience from beginning to end and brings the characters so vividly to life that you’ll find it difficult to stop listening. This book is a remarkable achievement by Sadera for a debut psychological thriller, and it will be exciting to see what she comes up with next!
