Sara Gallagher has always struggled with her temper and with obsessive behaviours. She’s prone to debilitating migraines as well. Adopted at birth, she grew up in a family with a gentle but passive mother and a domineering father who treats her differently from her two younger sisters, who aren’t adopted. But she has her life under control now and it’s going well. She’s got a 6 year old daughter, a fiance who is loving and patient, and a thriving business restoring antique furniture. She’s planning a fall wedding. And one day, she decides to search for her birth parents.
Sara’s search turns up a lot more than she bargained for. Sara finds her mother, a professor at a university, and realizes the woman is afraid and that she has changed her name. She hires a private investigator, and finds out that her father was a serial killer who raped his victims, and that her mother was the only one who survived.
Somehow, the information gets out onto the internet, including everyone’s real names and locations. (All is revealed at the end, when all the loose ties are neatly wrapped up, but I won’t spoil it for you by telling you who leaks this information.) Before she knows it, Sara is getting phone calls from her birth father, who wants a relationship with her, and from the police, who want her to engage him and even meet him, hoping to catch him.
She’s seeing a therapist, and the novel is structured as if she is constantly talking to her; every chapter begins with a paragraph directly addressed to the therapist. Sometimes this feels a bit strained, as in the few times when the therapist herself is involved, and then Sara says something like “you already know what happened but then Evan came home and I…” The story is told in the first person and that works well for this sort of novel, as it pulls the reader in although sometimes, one wonders about the accuracy of the reporting, especially when it comes to relationships with her adopted family.
Never Knowing is a very dramatic book. Sara develops a close relationship with one of the policemen assigned to her, a handsome man named Billy. She struggles with her fiance, who is naturally worried about her and doesn’t want her to engage her birth father at all much less meet him. She tries to keep her active and curious daughter in the dark about the whole thing, and she doesn’t tell her family either, because the police have instructed her not to. She blames herself when her birth father abducts and kills another woman on a day she missed his phone calls because her phone had been bumped to vibrate and she was out shopping for bridesmaids’ dresses. Yet Sara is ultimately a believable character caught in an unimaginable situation.
Those of you fascinated by crime stories or who enjoy suspenseful reads will thoroughly enjoy Never Knowing.
Elizabeth is thankful that her life is downright boring compared to the characters in this book. Read more of her dull, everyday life at her blog Planet Nomad.
Stephanie says
Wow, wild story! Adding to my list of must-reads!