Friends until the end

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This article was published 17/08/2024 (439 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In a murder mystery, turkey vultures eagerly convening over a lonely corner of a farmer’s field generally portends tragedy.

The corpse lying there is Diana Brewer, 17, a high school senior in her small Vermont town — smart student, gifted athlete, future veterinarian, daughter of a single mom who works nights, loved by all, no enemies in the world. Strangled to death.

The police focus on boyfriend Cameron — football star, big man on campus. His story is really solid, quite the unshakeable alibi… until it isn’t.

Or maybe the cops are looking at the unknown sleaze who was harassing and stalking Diana at her part-time job. An incel creep who liked to drive his beater pickup truck around small towns in Vermont and New York and even into Quebec, until he found a girl working cash after school that caught his eye, and obsessed on her. Does that make him a murderer?

And, come again, tell us that last part slowly, young witness sitting in the police station: which teacher allegedly did what to Diana? And why did the principal believe the teacher and not the girl, and what do you mean the principal never reported it?

What Have You Done? is the eighth murder mystery for Toronto lawyer Shari Lapena, and it grabs you in the opening pages and never lets go. The clichéd “fiendishly clever” covers only a small handful of authors — Gilly MacMillan, Ruth Ware, Peter Swanson and most assuredly Lapena.

If you’re hooked on these authors, you know the rules. Pretty much everyone in these books has to have secrets — they range from little ones that could nevertheless turn a plot to Really Big Secrets that could doom someone, though not necessarily make them a murderer. Lapena doles them out slowly, then reveals them, often without your ever having seen them coming.

Then, of course, everyone must lie. Or pretty much everyone, though you won’t learn here which characters are decent, folks you’d actually want to know. (There’s not many of them, though, mark you.)

Two of Diana’s closest friends begin their own sleuthing, while befriending and supporting her devastated mother. The cops in What Have You Done? are dogged and determined, but we don’t learn a lot about them outside the job.

Two people turn out to be betrothed, with different connections to the murder. Lapena will tell you when she’s ready.

As always with one on her books, there are married people having happy carnal relations… without being married to the individual with which said relations are happening. But who else knows?

Did Diana herself have secrets? Who’s willing to give suspects a dodgy alibi? Who’s willing to plant evidence, or destroy evidence? “If you love me, you’ll tell the police we were together that night… all night.” Golly, who says that to whom?

One character is really controlling, wants to know where their partner is at all times, wants to make all the decisions for both of them. How far would such a person go?

Lapena tries something quite unusual herein, and your book club can discuss if it works. Regardless, it doesn’t detract from a crackerjack of a mystery.

What Have You Done? is tragic. Lapena never lets you forget that a 17-year-old girl has been murdered, leaving behind a mother who will never forgive herself for working nights, and friends who know they’ll have a lifelong hole that can never be filled. Will they ever know who did it?

Lapena is good. Really good.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin understands why Shari Lapena can’t set her murder mysteries where she lives — surely no one would believe people in the GTA could lie and have secrets.