Excerpt from Those Who Knew by Idra Novey, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Are you listening? Lena asked on the phone. Did you fix your internet? You have to look up the obituary for Maria P. She's the student I told you I kept seeing in photos with Victor at the tuition marches. The way she was beaming at him at the podium, Olga, I had a sick feeling. I know he pushed her in front of that bus, Lena said-her declarations coming faster now-I'm certain of it.

Oh stop, you're not certain, Olga said, reminding Lena how many people got run over by buses barreling down the hills toward the port all the time. Maybe the girl was talking on one of those stupid new cellular phones, Olga said, and forgot to look up the road.

Maria was on a presidential fellowship, Lena said, and in civil engineering. That's not a person who would absentmindedly step in front of a diesel bus she could hear rumbling toward her from a block away.

Unless she was drunk, Olga said.

But Lena was no longer listening. She had already spun too far up into the tornado of her own conclusions. In a lower, more determined voice Lena declared Maria must have sent the sweater from some kind of afterlife limbo, the closest sweater Maria could find to her own. The design is a little different, Lena went on, but what else could a sweater that similar mean? Maria must be stuck in some kind of weigh station for murder victims and found out there what I let Victor get away with. Maybe she'll be stuck in a limbo state until I do something.

Olga tried to point out that Lena was projecting a considerable amount of meaning onto a sweater that could just be an odd coincidence. It's possible, Olga said, the cashier didn't want to bother with the Lost and Found on her meager five-minute break and decided to just slip it back in your bag.

But what about the obituary? Lena's voice rose again. I have the photo open on my computer, Olga-the sweater has the same open neckline and the check mark on the front is practically a zigzag. It's from her, I'm certain of it. And I could go to the police right now. I drank at the Minnow in my student days. I know that curve on Trinity Hill where she was killed. I could describe it, how I was walking up Trinity that night and saw Victor push her in front of that bus.

Except you didn't see him do that, Olga pointed out, insisting Lena come up to the bookstore to talk this through. You just have a hunch, Olga reminded her, and he has the backing of the entire Truth and Justice Party.



A week after a bus ran over a certain student activist on Trinity Hill, a prominent young senator by the name of Victor turned to the woman beside him in bed and made an offer. Through her ninth-floor windows, the view was pure blue, a few cruise ships moving along the divide between water and sky. There were no other buildings erected as flush against the ocean as this one. It jutted out further on the rocks than any of the other high-rises on this coveted coastline north of the port. The first time he'd slept here, months ago, had been partially out of curiosity about what it would be like to have his way with a woman who possessed such an exceptional view.

Waking each day to a horizon this continuous, he thought, could change the way a man approached things. Especially waking beside a woman who'd grown up among the founders of the TJP who still controlled the party-and therefore nearly every district on the island-since Cato. And he needed to do something to put an end to any rumors that might be circulating in the Senate behind his back, or among Maria's friends. She had assured him she'd told no one about her trips to his apartment, but she was a girl, and girls were feline, always purring up to one another with their secrets.

Marriage hadn't occurred to him as a potential solution until this morning. However, until this morning he had never lingered quite as long beside this meticulously maintained woman and her singular view. The handful of times he'd slept with her last summer, he'd lost interest too quickly in what she had to say to stick around after he woke. He preferred women with more ideas of their own, ideas they were hungry for him to hear and respond to-he relished being the one to dispense the sentence or two of affirmation they were after, and gauge what might happen after that.

Excerpted from Those Who Knew by Idra Novey. Copyright © 2018 by Idra Novey. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.