I put this in my get-at-library list back in 2023, thanks to its inclusion on the WSJ's best mysteries list for that year. As a bonus, it's set in New Hampshire! (A heavily fictionalized New Hampshire, but what are you gonna do?)
The first-person narrator is Bodie Kane In a stylistic twist, Bodie's narration is addressed to another character—the "you" in the title—as if Bodie's writing/speaking to them. That choice comes into focus as the book proceeds.
Bodie is returning to the boarding school whence she graduated a couple decades back. She's been invited to teach a couple of mini-courses in an interim few weeks between semesters. Bodie's time at the school was unhappy, and marred by the murder of her onetime roommate, Thalia. Omar, an African-American athletic manager, was arrested and convicted for the crime (after confessing, then quickly recanting). But…
One of Bodie's courses is about podcast production, and one of her students wants to craft her podcast to revisit the crime. The student believes a miscarriage of justice occurred, and someone else did Thalia in. Bodie gets drawn into the student's investigation, and down the rabbit hole they go. Eventually, troubling facts emerge.
It's billed as a "literary" mystery, which (as near as I can tell) means a lot of discursive, flowery language. And anything that could be described as "action" is minimal. Bodie's narration involves plenty of navel-gazing, deep reflections on her life. She's estranged from her husband, who, in a sideshow to the main plot, is being fingered for a sexual harassment incident. She has a sorta-lover down in Boston, but he seems strangely unenthusiastic about coming up to see her while she's in the area. And there are a lot of other characters introduced, a bunch in the present, and a bunch from the past, and everyone seems dysfunctional in their own special ways. And there's occasional commentary in the "believe all women" vein, which probably seemed less quaint back then.
And (caveat lector) you may find the ending unsatisfying. I thought it was OK, but…
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