Alafair Burke is known for her clever, twisty mysteries, and “The Note” is no exception. She keeps us guessing almost to the end. There are three female protagonists who are also best friends, although while they refer to themselves as best friends, several windows into the past make us wonder just how “bestie” they actually are.
Interestingly, the entire narrative is in third person, from different characters’ points of view, but one character is left out. We get to understand two of the women through the narrative that lets us know how they feel and what they are thinking, but there is one person we don’t get to know on that level. And does that serve to make us distrust that person a bit more than the others?
The three women vacation together in the Hamptons, and once they are together there, we see their personalities emerge. May is definitely the introvert, the worrier, the planner. Kelsey is the drinker, the heavy drinker, the partier. Lauren is the oldest. She can drink and plan, and she often seems like the glue that holds the trio together. What we learn through Burke’s slow reveal of the women’s past is that each has had something in her life that was not only traumatic, but made them infamous for a while.
May went viral in a video that showed her reacting to someone calling her an Asian pejorative right after COVID as she questioned people waiting for the subway about why they weren’t following the rules about wearing masks on public transportation. Her reaction, her terrible overreaction, changed the trajectory of her life; she became a law school professor rather than a prosecutor. Lauren’s viral moment was after years of being involved with a much older, wealthier man who owned the music camp where the girls met. May and Kelsey attended the camp, and Lauren was a talented musician who ran the music department. After an anonymous note revealed her relationship with the owner, and right after a woman drowned on the campgrounds, Lauren left the camp. She was the only person of color in a position of authority at the camp, and she felt it was logical that the drowning was blamed on her.
Kelsey comes from an extremely wealthy family whose success had murky beginnings. She worked as a successful commercial real estate broker but was pretty much at her father’s beck and call. And he was an overprotective father, especially after the murder of Kelsey’s husband several years before. Because Kelsey and her husband were in the process of divorcing, there were rumors that she had her husband killed. And there were reasons why she might have been better off with him dead than simply out of her life.
When the three friends are looking for a parking spot on their way to dinner, a couple steal the parking spot that was clearly theirs. They release their frustrations at this wrongdoing by writing anonymous notes to the couple after downing several drinks. May’s note is sensible and mentions responsibility and fairness. Lauren’s is short but brilliant. Her note says, “He’s cheating. He always cheats.” The women laugh, Kelsey pockets the notes saying she’s going to create a scrapbook for them, and they think nothing more about it. But when the guy ends up dead with a gunshot to his head, just like Kelsey’s husband, and there are connections to the women, there’s no more laughing.
May has always loved solving mysteries. As a prosecutor, she worked the crimes and kept digging into inconsistencies even after she had enough to prosecute. So now she’s determined to find out who really killed the guy and even maybe who killed Kelsey’s husband. There are definite twists and surprises as the narrative reveals much about the past actions of the characters, including things they’d rather not remember.
But as we’d suspect with an author of Burke’s caliber, the ending is not only unexpected, it’s heartbreaking in many ways. The novel is about family, the family we are born into but also the family we create along the way. It’s about people whose intentions are good, but how sometimes good intentions can end up going horribly wrong. Each of these people has done things that turned out tragically wrong, and the ending shows us how little we might be in control of our own destiny.
Burke’s ability to have us care about these people is what makes her books so popular, and by the end of this novel, we do hope that each of these flawed women finds her way to a better future.
This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.