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Each year, many crimes go unsolved—an alarming number, really—buried in secrets and lies and cover-ups. And in the chilling drama I’ll Never Tell by author Catherine McKenzie, a family is forced to revisit an unsolved crime from their past in order to determine their future.
The story searches for answers to a 20-year-old crime with the five MacAllister siblings. As they all return to their family’s home at Camp Macaw for their parents’ memorial service, they know they’ll need to decide what to do with the camp. The family’s only brother, Ryan, desperately needs the money, so he comes prepared to convince his sisters to sell. But at the reading of the will, the process is complicated by their father’s decades-old suspicions—and before they can decide the future of the camp, they’ll have to figure out what happened to Amanda Holmes.
This story of the MacAllister siblings, their complicated relationships, and the one fateful night that changed everything quickly escalates from a tense family drama into a tangled soap opera of secrets and affairs. Each chapter tells the story of the family’s memorial weekend from a different perspective, following the five siblings and Sean, the camp’s long-time groundskeeper. Interspersed with the characters’ thoughts and observations are Amanda’s own reflections of her attack, revealing one piece at a time.
Really, though, the whole thing is a little too extreme. Every character here is hiding decades of deep, dark secrets and scandalous affairs—to the point that it becomes almost commonplace. After a while, nothing here feels particularly shocking, including the identity of Amanda’s attacker. And everything—from the biggest revelation to the smallest misunderstanding—is turned into something grand and dramatic.
Despite all of the drama and scandal, though, the characters aren’t especially interesting. Though their personalities may be different, none of them stand out. None are the kind of characters that you’d want to get to know more in-depth—because they all seem rather bland and even unlikable. And that makes it seem even stranger that the siblings’ father was apparently stalking them all and recording their every action and every relationship for years, though his obsessive investigations don’t really amount to much in the end.
Still, while the drama may sometimes be overplayed and the writing tends to feel manipulative, the story is still tense—and despite the novel’s flaws, the tension will keep readers going, waiting to see how the pieces come together and what the family will decide.
If you miss the melodrama and gossip of summer camp, you may enjoy the secrets and revelations of I’ll Never Tell. But the overdone drama and the uninteresting characters make it an unsatisfying read.
Listen to the review on Shelf Discovery:
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