Someone Knows
By Vi Keeland
As a college English professor, Elizabeth looks forward to the start of each new semester teaching her creative writing seminar. At least until she reads chapter one of The Reckoning, a tale about a high school senior who has an affair with her teacher. To anyone else it would be the beginning of a great page-turner, but to Elizabeth it is the beginning of the end.
She knows this story. It’s all familiar because she lived it. The girl in the story was her best friend Jocelyn, and Elizabeth knows exactly how the story will end—with the professor dead. Because she was the one who killed him.
Someone knows what Elizabeth did twenty years ago and her secret is about to be exposed, but who is the mystery student submitting the chapters? In an effort to find out, Elizabeth returns to her Louisiana hometown where it soon becomes clear that no matter how many years have gone by, she can’t escape her past.
My thoughts:
This book had an intriguing premise, strong prose, and a setup that should have worked for me. Unfortunately, this was my second book by Vi Keeland, and I’m starting to think her style just isn’t for me.
The story opens with a genuinely compelling hook. Elizabeth, a college English professor, is preparing for a new semester when she reads the first chapter of a student’s submitted manuscript. The story centers on a high school girl having an affair with her teacher. For Elizabeth, this isn’t just fiction. It’s her past. The girl in the story was her best friend, Jocelyn. And Elizabeth knows how the story ends because she was the one who killed the professor involved.
That setup grabbed me immediately. There’s built-in tension, moral complexity, and the promise of an unreliable narrator wrestling with guilt, secrecy, and exposure. On paper, this is exactly the kind of domestic thriller I usually enjoy.
The problem, for me, was execution.
While the writing itself is solid and often quite sharp, I struggled with the author’s narrative choices. Both books I’ve read by Keeland rely on the same structural device: a final chapter told from the perspective of a character we never hear directly from until the very end. That character exists solely to deliver a last-sentence reveal or twist. In this case, the twist felt painfully obvious from early on, which made the final reveal feel less like a payoff and more like a box being checked.
What frustrated me most is that the book feels written for the twist rather than the story. Instead of letting tension build organically through character and consequence, the narrative seems engineered to funnel the reader toward a single “gotcha” moment. I was actually prepared to rate this book higher until that final chapter appeared and confirmed the same formula I’d already experienced (and hated) in her previous novel.
Character work was another sticking point. Elizabeth is positioned as an unreliable narrator, which I usually love, but I struggled to connect with her. She never fully came to life for me, and neither did the supporting cast. This was an issue I had with Keeland’s last book as well. The characters felt more like they were checking a box for the type of book she was writing than fully realized people, which made it harder to care about their fates or emotional stakes.
There’s also a difference between predictability and inevitability. Some stories telegraph their endings but still feel satisfying because the journey is rich and emotionally grounded. Here, once I clocked where things were headed, the rest of the book felt like waiting for confirmation rather than discovery.
That said, I don’t think this is a bad book. The premise is genuinely interesting, and the idea of being haunted by a shared secret from decades earlier is effective. The academic setting, the creative writing class, and the slow return to Elizabeth’s Louisiana hometown all provide atmosphere and opportunity for tension. I just wish the story had trusted those elements more instead of relying so heavily on clichés and a late-stage reveal.
Ultimately, this book gets credit for an intriguing concept and competent writing, but the characters and structural choices kept it from landing for me. If you enjoy thrillers built around final twists and big reveals, this may work better for you than it did for me. As for me, this one confirmed that Vi Keeland’s particular formula just isn’t my thing, even when the premise itself is strong.
