No One Will Miss Her by Kat Rosenfield
Published by William Morrow
Publication date: October 12, 2021
Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Suspense
Bookshop
Everyone has their own understanding of what appeals to them in fiction. Something I love is a dead narrator. For some reason, this makes me implicitly trust them. It’s even better if they acknowledge their own unlikability as is the case with the unloved Lizzie Ouellette. No One Will Miss Her opens with her imagining an old drunk sitting around the local bar after her death and announcing, “It ain’t like me to speak ill of the dead, but the hell with it—good riddance to her!” This is someone who’s not going to sugarcoat anything in the pages to follow. It’s also a character I want to know more about and in No One Will Miss Her I get exactly what I want.
Lizzie’s alcoholic father runs the junkyard in Copper Falls and raises her on his own with the not-unexpected result that she endures a childhood of bullying for being unkempt and boyish. There are two ways children go with this—run or stand down the bullies. Lizzie chooses the latter, seeming to almost revel in her hard luck. She then commits an even greater sin by claiming pregnancy to trap the town’s favorite son. The marriage is no good for either and now the local police have discovered her body (in parts) at home. Her husband is missing.
A state police detective is called in and Lizzie’s life is unwound. This unwinding brings to light yet another reason the locals dislike her so much: she rents an old summer cottage she inherited to outsiders. Mostly a woman from Boston, an Instagram influencer with enough wealth and entitlement to make everyone miserable even as they take her money. Questions arise: Why would someone who could go anywhere spend her summers in a backwoods Maine town?
No One Will Miss Her is told from Lizzie’s (dead) perspective and Adrienne, the woman who appears to have the life Lizzie longs for. As the detective digs and speaks with Adrienne he realizes that despite the disparities, these two are more alike than they are different. With a steady hand author Kat Rosenfield marks the twisted trail between Lizzie and Adrienne leading the reader into a plot that, while it may sway into the implausible, is still vastly entertaining.
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*I received a free copy of this book from William Morrow in exchange for an honest review.*
This book was already on my books to read list at the library. Its getting a lot of buzz.
I will probably read it, maybe next month when things slow down at the library and books are easier to get.
I have a big pile of books to get through right now so it will have to wait.
Too many books is the best problem!
This sounds like an intriguing thriller!
I enjoyed it, but know others didn’t like it as much. It was great fast reading.
I guess dead people narratives reminds me of Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, which creeped me out. But they are often effective!
I forgot that one! It was so good. This isn’t creepy, just a thriller mystery.