Review: ONLY WE KNOW by Karen Perry

The second offering from the Irish writing partnership of Karen Perry (aka Karen Gillece and Paul Perry), Only We Know (Penguin) opens on a riverbank in Kenya’s Masai Mara in 1982, with Sally arriving moments too late to prevent a tragedy that involves her young sons Luke and Nicky and their friend Katie. The story then moves forward to 2013, when Katie is a journalist in Dublin, Luke a successful businessman, and Nicky a recently married musician living in Nairobi. The trio’s belief that their tragic secret is known only to them is revealed to be a fallacy when Katie receives a bizarre and ominous token in the post, and soon their lives are spiralling out of control as this psychological thriller, which offers alternating viewpoints and subjective interpretations of the truth of what really happened on that fateful day, strips back the layers of deceit that has sustained them in the intervening decades. Only We Know builds handsomely on the promise of The Boy That Never Was (2014), plausibly and hauntingly exploring the extent to which guilt, shame and secrecy can shape, define and eventually destroy lives. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

One to Watch: ONLY WE KNOW by Karen Perry

The writing partnership Karen Perry (right) hit the ground running last year with a terrific debut psychological thriller, THE BOY THAT NEVER WAS, so I’m very much looking forward to seeing what they do with their follow-up offering, ONLY WE KNOW (Penguin). Quoth the blurb elves:

Kenya, 1982. The relentless sun beats down on the Maasai Mara. Three children, Nick, Luke and Katie, bored and hot, go down to the river alone. But when their innocent game by the banks of the river goes horribly wrong, their lives are changed forever and they are eternally bound by a shocking and suffocating secret.
  Dublin, 2013. Their secret is buried, but not forgotten, and when Luke goes missing in violent circumstances it becomes clear that their childhood mistakes have come back to haunt them . . .

  ONLY WE KNOW will be published on June 4.

Boy, Interrupted

Karen Perry’s THE BOY THAT NEVER WAS (Penguin / Michael Joseph) is an intriguing prospect, being the debut crime thriller from a writing team composed of Karen Gillece and Paul Perry. Karen is the author of several literary novels, including SEVEN NIGHTS IN ZARAGOZA and LONGSHORE DRIFT, while Paul is not only a critically acclaimed author, but a lecturer in Creative Writing for Kingston University, London, Writer Fellow for University College Dublin, and Course Director in Poetry for the Faber Academy in Dublin. Quoth the blurb elves:

You were loved and lost – then you came back …
  Five years ago, three-year-old Dillon disappeared. For his father Harry – who left him alone for ten crucial minutes – it was an unforgivable lapse. Yet Dillon’s mother Robyn has never blamed her husband: her own secret guilt is burden enough.
  Now they’re trying to move on, returning home to Dublin to make a fresh start.
  But their lives are turned upside down the day Harry sees an eight-year-old boy in the crowd. A boy Harry is convinced is Dillon. But the boy vanishes before he can do anything about it.
  What Harry thought he saw quickly plunges their marriage into a spiral of crazed obsession and broken trust, uncovering deceits and shameful secrets. Everything Robyn and Harry ever believed in one another is cast into doubt.
  And at the centre of it all is the boy that never was …

  THE BOY THAT NEVER WAS arrives with impressive advance praise from Tana French, Jeffrey Deaver, John Boyne and Nelson DeMille. For all the details, clickety-click here …