Promise Not to Tell by Jennifer McMahon
Harper Paperbacks April 10, 2007
Paperback, 250 Pages
Review Copy
Forty-one-year-old school nurse Kate Cypher has returned home to rural Vermont to care for her mother who’s afflicted with Alzheimer’s. On the night she arrives, a young girl is murdered—a horrific crime that eerily mirrors another from Kate’s childhood. Three decades earlier, her dirt-poor friend Del—shunned and derided by classmates as “Potato Girl”—was brutally slain. Del’s killer was never found, while the victim has since achieved immortality in local legends and ghost stories. Now, as this new murder investigation draws Kate irresistibly in, her past and present collide in terrifying, unexpected ways. Because nothing is quite what it seems . . . and the grim specters of her youth are far from forgotten.
Review
A murder of a young girl and a town full of bumps in the night begin our creepy little story of twisted secrets 30 years ago……….
Kate knew Del as a dirty faced tomboy, the town knew her as the potato girl (I imagined Del and her family closely resembling The Swamp People) who they mocked, mistreated and gave no thought to. Over the years after Del's death, with the murder unsolved and the killer still at large, people conjured up what could have happened to her and out of speculation, she becomes the scary ghost story over a camp fire, the little girl who haunts the forest looking for revenge on anyone who crosses her path. Legend has it, The Potato Girl eagerly waits for her killer to come home.
In the 70's culture was shifting drastically and most children were caught right in the middle, yet even with free love and anti-government, people still carried with them prejudices of yesterday and as messed up as Del's family was, it was easy to see how nobody wanted anything to with her, she was weird and weird always spells ignorance when people begin to judge what they don’t know. She was also a prime candidate for a child who could easily be taken advantage of and to my queasy stomach a lot of things I was hoping wasn’t going on, indeed was. On the other side of the story we have Kate, who's childhood wasn’t a bowl of roses either, she grew up with her hippie mother, moving around in a tepee. (A. Tepee!) and watched men come and go from her mothers bed (separated from her bed by a curtain) as they lived this free-love everyone’s doing drugs and sleeping with entire communes type of life. She lacked guidance and the overall security any child needs. I think that’s why Del fascinated her, she was a kid who had a life more messed up than her own.
As the story unfolds, the book go’s back and forth between each murder and the mystery surrounding each girls death, as Kate gets closer to the truth pieces of the night when she was ten and pieces of the current day begin to add up. By the end there is a handful of potential suspects including Kate herself, who just happens to own the knife used to slit the throat of an unlikely victim.
I thought McMahon’s writing was engrossing and while I didn’t like the subject matter, I think Promise Not to Tell did a great job with the creepy, the twisted and the disturbing. On all levels Del’s life was pretty terrible, the abuse, the loss of her innocence, everything about her story and this book made me squirm a bit with its mystery and weird sexual undertones. While it was a shocker to find out who the actual killer was, Im left with one word…unnerved.
Rating
Promise Not to Tell is recommended to adult readers and contains: Sexuality, murder, incest, bisexuality, language, disturbing family life and mental health issues.
3/5- Mystery-Suspense
Thanks to Harper and Tlc for review Copy
I know what you mean about liking the writing but not liking the content - it sounds like this book has some creepy goings-on inside!
ReplyDeleteThanks for being on the tour.
Ugh. She had had to sleep in a tepee listening to her mother sleep with random guys while only separated by a curtain? Yuck. This one definitely sounds disturbing, one that will make me want to take a shower after reading it just to wash the memory of it off. It's nice that it's well written enough to incite that kind of reaction though!
ReplyDeleteThe back and forth has me a bit confused, but that is nothing new for me. LOL
ReplyDeleteSo the free love era suddenly doesn't sound as as fun as I once thought it might be.
I read and reviewed this one too and thought it was pretty entertaining. I'm glad to hear that you liked it too!
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