Excerpt from Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Wasn't it supposed to get easier once you got published? Instead, I was already forgotten and even more broke than before. I felt cheated by my own fantasies. My apartment was the size and shape of a one-car garage, chalky white and "garden" (basement) level. There was no garden, nor air-conditioning, nor a thermostat. I ate cheap food, which gave me daily stomach cramps. My bed was a nearly clean mattress I had found leaning against a Dumpster.

I was living with my decision to forgo some safe, progressively lucrative career in exchange for any writing time I could snatch. I had been temping for two years. That week, I was doing data entry and wearing a white name tag that said TEMP, although sometimes people called me "the new Linda." It was an upgrade from my last temp job two weeks before, as a receptionist at a large medical practice where they refused to give me a chair because they couldn't spare one from the crowded waiting room. I had to stand for eight hours a day crouched over their black eighteen-line phone to transfer calls, and my back and ego still hurt from it.

That year was the worst of a multiyear drought that plagued five western states. In the summer, sixteen fires had erupted across the state in the space of a few months. The flames were mostly ignited from lightning strikes on dry, beetle-killed lodgepole pines, except for one from a coal-seam fire that had been burning underground since 1910. All the fires killed nine firefighters and burned a total of almost 430,000 acres of forest in one summer, and some fires still burned into that autumn. Grayson's clothes smelled dry-cleaned, but mine reeked of the mottled, unlaunderable campfire-like smoke, as did the books we held in our hands. There was no rain. This—Grayson's offer—felt like rain.

I kept a running list of all the jobs I wanted to hold in my lifetime but never believed I could. "Private investigator" was number two, right after "writer," and before about seventeen other jobs that included "composer," "food critic," and, for some reason, "cobbler." Crime excited me in the abstract. I had wanted to be a PI ever since I read my first Dashiell Hammett book. I wanted to help people and find things out, not necessarily in that order. I wanted to be the one who could walk into a room and know what happened there.

I loved secrets, even terrible ones. Especially terrible ones. When people told me things, I felt happy. The more they didn't want to tell me that secret, the happier I felt when they did. Secret information was something I earned at a cost—someone else's cost. I could hoard that intelligence and never lose it. It was one of the few things in the world that was entirely mine.

Even if I hadn't wanted the job, I would have taken it anyway. I was used to accepting any employment offered, regardless of how I felt about it. Lie to creditors? Sure! Lie about our money-back guarantee? Sure! Lie about the doctor's nooner whereabouts to his wife as she jiggles a screaming toddler covered in chicken pox? Sure, absolutely, you bet!

So I didn't even ask this lawyer about the cases, or what I'd have to do to extract the confessions he was talking about. It didn't matter. He wanted me, so I would take the job. But this Grayson person seemed like a nice guy, so I said, "I have to make this clear. I don't have any experience as a private investigator."

Grayson grinned. "Perfect," he said.

* * *

My first few cases, I had no idea what I was doing. Grayson sent me to a women's triathlon where a personal injury client had gotten run over by a bicycle the previous year. His instructions were rushed—for lawyers, every minute is worth dollars—so I wasn't sure how to find witnesses to talk to. During the race I held up a fluorescent green poster board sign that said DID YOU SEE A BICYCLE ACCIDENT HERE A YEAR AGO? IF SO, PLEASE TALK TO ME!! Nobody talked to me. I got a bad sunburn.

Excerpted from Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse. Copyright © 2022 by Erika Krouse. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.