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Book Summary and Reviews of No One Can Know by Kate Alice Marshall

No One Can Know by Kate Alice Marshall

No One Can Know

A Novel

by Kate Alice Marshall

  • Critics' Consensus (6):
  • Published:
  • Jan 2024, 336 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

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.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"A propulsive and intricate psychological thriller... Meticulously plotted... Marshall's deft writing teases out revelations aplenty, perpetually ratcheting up the tension―and an element of violence―while keeping the story skimming along. Family connections prove both their damage and their worth in this community-focused thriller." ―Kirkus (starred review)

"Propulsive mystery-cum-psychological drama... Marshall shrewdly interlaces past and present timelines, alternating perspectives between the three sisters to shed new light on old information. Even genre veterans will have trouble sussing out the culprit. Skillful misdirection and urgent plotting make this a winner." ―Publishers Weekly

"The dual time line and shifting points of view keep the reader hooked, revealing a complex web of family dynamics and characters. Marshall has penned an extremely twisty suspense novel…the story is a well-paced and solid psychological thriller." —Booklist

This information about No One Can Know was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Kate Alice Marshall Author Biography

Kate Alice Marshall is the author of the young adult novels I Am Still Alive, Rules for Vanishing, and Our Last Echoes, as well as the Secrets of Eden Eld middle grade series. She lives outside of Seattle, where she spends her time playing board games, tending a chaotic vegetable garden, and wrangling dogs and children.

Link to Kate Alice Marshall's Website

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