Inspired in part by author Sandie Jones’ teenage devotion to the 80s band Duran Duran, her new novel “I Would Die for You” features a different boy band, but a groupie who was even more devoted and crazy about following the band than she was. While Nicole Forbes is the main character and it’s her first person narration that tells the story of the “present” in Coronado, California in 2011, the other thread is the narration about her family in London, 1986, and revolves around her sick mother and her band-crazy sister Cassie.
Cassie is mad about the band Secret Oktober, and is especially “in love” with Ben, one of the three members of the band. At one band appearance, she meets Amelia, who is just as wild a fan but who also manages to get inside information. With that the two become fast friends and ditch school to follow the band to drug-laden parties, press conferences, and become part of the throngs of people at the airport seeing them off and welcoming them back from tours. Cassie’s father and her older sister Nicole disapprove, but Cassie’s mother understands. Cassie’s mother is dying from cancer, though, so she’s not there to curb Cassie’s wilder impulses and get her to see reality.
When Ben, the charismatic singer in the band, is kind to Cassie, she sees it as an epic romance. Ben just sees her as a star-struck sixteen-year-old. Another band member, Michael, is not as kind. He’s a misogynist and an abuser. He’s into drugs and women and the fast lane, and he takes advantage of others at every opportunity, including Cassie.
When a stranger shows up at Nicole’s door in California twenty-five years after the events that culminated in a murder that caused her to flee England, Nicole is terrified. She hasn’t told her husband anything about her past, and she even dyed her red hair to change her looks. Her husband doesn’t know she’s a redhead and when their daughter, Hannah, now eight, had red hair, he wondered where it came from. She didn’t tell him then that her natural color is red, and she’s told him nothing about her part in the Secret Oktober scandal. There are so many secrets that she’s kept from him that she doesn’t know how to finally tell him the truth about her past.
As Jones takes us back in forth in time she slowly allows us to learn about what happened all those years ago. But it’s a very measured reveal, and we don’t know exactly what happened until almost the end. In the meantime, we are left trying to put the pieces together to understand who died, how they died, and who was the perpetrator of the violence.
While there are several red herrings and omissions that make it difficult to identify the mystery woman who appears in 2011 at Nicole’s doorstep, at times the lack of information is a bit forced. Nicole’s eight-year-old daughter is kidnapped by someone claiming to be Nicole’s sister. But Nicole has told her husband that she doesn’t have a sister, so who was the woman who took Hannah from school? Was it Zoe, the stranger who had just appeared on Hannah’s doorstep? Nicole talks to Zoe about “her mother” without naming the mother, but we have no idea who Zoe’s mother is, yet it’s apparent that Nicole does. It feels like we should be privy to that information as well, but it would ruin the final reveal.
Music lovers, mystery lovers, and fans of Sandie Jones will enjoy this mystery with its deep dive into how far we will go to satisfy our fandom and how dangerous that fandom can be. This novel also takes a hard look at the secrets we keep and and how corrosive they can be as we see secrets kept in 1986 and secrets kept in 2011 that come back to haunt Nicole and threaten to destroy her life.
This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.