I Have Some Questions for You

Genre

Mystery, Crime & Thriller

Publisher

Viking (Penguin Random House)

Publication year

2023

ISBN

9780593490143

Returning to the New England boarding school where she was a student, a successful podcaster becomes fixated on the unsolved 1990s murder of her former roommate, and on whether the man convicted of it was wrongly accused. Rebecca Makkai's literary thriller examines memory, race and the...

Invited back to teach a short course at the New England boarding school of her youth, film scholar and podcaster Bodie Kane finds herself unable to leave alone the death that shadowed her student years: the 1990s murder of her roommate Thalia, and the Black athletic trainer convicted of it on evidence Bodie increasingly distrusts. Rebecca Makkai, a two-time Pulitzer finalist, brings literary heft to a true-crime frame, using the reinvestigation to probe memory's unreliability, the racial fault lines of American justice, and our appetite for consuming other people's tragedies. The novel is both a genuine whodunit and a critique of the genre it inhabits, narrated in a restless second person that keeps circling the victim it cannot quite know. It asks hard questions about who gets believed and why, without sacrificing suspense. For readers who want crime fiction with the ambition of literary fiction, it is intelligent, provocative and deeply absorbing.