An Unputdownable, Modern Mystery: Read a Review of You Don’t Know Me by Sara Foster

You Don’t Know Me is an excellent page turner. I read it in a day… I couldn’t put it down.

Lizzie Burdett was eighteen when she vanished and Noah Carruso has never forgotten her. She was his first crush, his unrequited love. She was also his brother Tom’s girlfriend.

Tom Carruso hasn’t been home in over a decade. He left soon after Lizzie disappeared under a darkening cloud of suspicion, and now he’s back for the inquest into Lizzie’s death – intent on telling his side of the story. He knows everyone thinks he did it. Everyone knows they’d fought just before she went missing. But he wasn’t involved, was he?

As the inquest looms, Noah meets Alice Pryce in Thailand, where he’s gone to escape the past and specifically his brother’s return home. Noah spots Alice on a boat on Bangkok’s Chao Praya River and thinks he’s seen a ghost. With her long red hair, there is a haunting similarity to Lizzie. Back on land he runs into her again, and the attraction is immediate and they start a romance. They fall for each other fast and hard. But Noah has to return to Australia for Lizzie’s inquest, and Alice is living in Thailand teaching English. However, before long Alice follows Noah back to Australia and their relationship continues. But Noah can’t bear to tell Alice his deepest fears. And Alice is equally stricken – she carries a terrible secret of her own. Is the truth worth telling if it will destroy everything?

You Don’t Know Me is a stunning new thriller about the burden of shame. It is the sixth novel by British-born Australian author, Sara Foster, and really sets her up as one of the country’s top crime writers. Clever plotting and expert pacing has you glued to the edge of your seat, never really certain of who killed Lizzie. I thought I knew a couple of times, but actually couldn’t be sure, which always makes for a great read. The ending is bittersweet. Not everything is tied up, and some questions remain, although Lizzie, and what happened to her can finally be put to rest.

At its heart, this is a love story. Noah and Alice are both really likeable characters, well-drawn and complex. You want them to succeed in love, and yet the odds appear to be against them. At least for now. The relationship between Noah and Tom is also excellent, with so many unsaid things between these brothers coming to a boil. As a mystery, it’s a modern one, with Lizzie’s disappearance the focus of a true crime podcast, and the reader witness to the power of that medium in such cases.

You Don’t Know Me is an excellent page turner. I read it in a day… I couldn’t put it down.

Buy a copy of You Don’t Know Me here.

About the author:

Sara Foster was born and raised in England, and moved to Australia in 2004. She has published four other novels: Come Back to Me, Beneath the Shadows, Shallow Breath and All That is Lost Between Us. She lives near Perth with her husband and two young daughters, and is currently a doctoral candidate with Curtin University.