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Book: “You Know What You Did” by K.T. Nguyen
Publishing Info: Dutton, April 2024
Where Did I Get This Book: I received an eARC from NetGalley.
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: In this heart-pounding debut thriller for fans of Lisa Jewell and Celeste Ng, a first-generation Vietnamese American artist must confront nightmares past and present…
Annie “Anh Le” Shaw grew up poor but seems to have it all now: a dream career, a stunning home, and a devoted husband and daughter. When Annie’s mother, a Vietnam War refugee, dies suddenly one night, Annie’s carefully curated life begins to unravel. Her obsessive-compulsive disorder, which she thought she’d vanquished years ago, comes roaring back—but this time, the disturbing fixations swirling around in Annie’s brain might actually be coming true.
A prominent art patron disappears, and the investigation zeroes in on Annie. Spiraling with self-doubt, she distances herself from her family and friends, only to wake up in a hotel room—naked, next to a lifeless body. The police have more questions, but with her mind increasingly fractured, Annie doesn’t have answers. All she knows is this: She will do anything to protect her daughter—even if it means losing herself.
With dizzying twists, You Know What You Did is both a harrowing thriller and a heartfelt exploration of the refugee experience, the legacies we leave for our children, and the unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters.
Review: Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of this novel!
It’s been a little bit since I’ve tackled a straight unreliable narrator thriller on the blog, though that isn’t super surprising because of all the tantalizing horror novels that have been coming out this Spring. But we are finally firmly back in this genre, and this time with a debut that caught my eye awhile back! “You Know What You Did” by K.T. Nguyen has been patiently sitting on my NetGalley for awhile now, and like I almost always do with my NetGalley books this was because I wanted to read it closer to the release date. By the time I came to it it had been kind of simmering on my book back burner, and I was eager to dive in.
As far as a thriller and as a mystery, I generally enjoyed this one. It has a unique hook and a unique voice, as we follow Annie, the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee who has tried to maintain a complete control over her life and identity in the face of a difficult upbringing and OCD diagnosis. After her mother dies, Annie starts having a potential relapse of her disgust driven OCD, and starts to question her reality and the things that she is, or maybe isn’t, doing. It’s a pretty solid device that is meant to deepen the mystery of what is going on with Annie (more on that below), as well as what involvement she may or may not have when one of her clients goes missing, and her erratic behaviors ramp up. In terms of the straight up mystery of Annie’s role in the combustion of her sanity and her potential propensity towards violence that she can’t recall, I had a pretty good guess from the jump as to what was going on. That isn’t to say that Nguyen didn’t have a well thought out mystery, as she did. The puzzle pieces were placed very well and it all came together seamlessly. The suspense about Annie’s mental state was also well done, as I was definitely worried about her. But if you look past the various red herrings, the truth of it all was fairly easy to predict.
And while I am generally apt to kind of side eye thrillers that have mental illness as a plot device to propel the conflict, I thought that “You Know What You Did” did a VERY good job with these themes. It almost certainly helps that Nguyen has an author’s note about her own experiences with OCD, and how that helps contextualize the symptoms and the thought processes that Annie has which intrude upon her every day thinking, and adds to her unreliability. Her OCD makes her fixate on things and makes it so she has a hard time potentially knowing what is real and what isn’t, and as strange and at times violent things happen in her vicinity, it makes for questions about how much is due to her own actions, even if she doesn’t realize it. But it also never paints it as a grotesque caricature of the condition, which can be a trap when various mental illnesses are used to drive the conflict of a thriller. I also appreciated that this doesn’t just apply to Annie, but also as we peel back the layers of her emotionally distant and abusive mother. When we start learning about Annie’s mother, we see a woman who is a hoarder, who does little more but insult her daughter, and who has decimated her self worth to make her dependent on her and within her control. But we also explore what made her this way, by learning about the trauma and loss as a refugee in the years after the Vietnam War. It doesn’t make excuses, but shows how generational trauma and untreated mental illness can have far reaching consequences, and how we don’t always know the full picture of things, be it a person or a thriller novel.
I am definitely eager to see what K.T. Nguyen brings next, because “You Know What You Did” was entertaining as hell.
Rating 7: A unique and well plotted thriller that succeeds in using mental illness as a plot device without being exploitative, this mystery is entertaining, though perhaps easier to untangle than I was expecting.
Reader’s Advisory:
“You Know What You Did” is included on the Goodreads lists “Mystery & Thriller 2024”, and “Female Psychological Thrillers/Suspense Written by Women”.
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