Book Review: The Truth You Told

Title: The Truth You Told
Author: Brianna Labuskes
Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Fiction, Suspense

What It’s About: Raisa Susanto, an FBI agent, senses that someone has been watching her and following her during her morning run, as she waits for her coffee. At first she’s not able to find anyone looking for her, so when she gets her coffee, she goes into the crowd, and then decides that her best bet at finding out who it is, is to make it obvious that she has left the coffee shop. She hides in a secluded spot, until a woman walks by, having exited the coffee shop. Raisa shoves her into the spot, with her arm on her throat, and threatens her until the woman talks. She tells her that she is following her to get some information from her about applying to a linguistics program, but Raisa smells bs on that, and forcefully asks her even further as to what she is doing following her, threatening her to call the police and have her arrested for stalking an FBI agent. The woman eventually reveals that she is Kate Tashibi—the documentarian who reached out to Raisa weeks ago to ask questions about the Alphabet Man. Raisa tells her she has nothing to share, and to not even follow her around or else she will be dealing with the FBI.

Raisa goes to the courthouse for Isabel’s court trial, with Callum Kilkenny by her side, and her sister seems to be thoroughly focused on Kilkenny, which freaks them both out a bit. Suddenly, the news comes out that the Alphabet Man has confessed to never having killed Shay, Kilkenny’s wife. Callum walks out of the court room in anger, making a scene, and Raisa follows him, but in the time it took her to go after him, he had disappeared. So Raisa tries to check on him at home, but does not find him anywhere, and ultimately goes to speak to Isabel to find out what that is all about, only for Isabel to tell her that the Alphabet Man—Nathaniel Conrad—did not kill Shay Kilkenny, and that the letters where the ones that lead her to that conclusion. So Raisa goes to check out the letters in her own spare time, while waiting for Kilkenny to come home. She comes to the conclusion that the letters were written by different individuals, as the idiolect was different in both.

Four and a half years ago before her kidnapping, Shay sang an Eminiem rap song with her younger sister, Maxine ‘Max’ Barker, a 12 year old who had been the one to shoot her father at their home and then call it in as a burglary gone wrong. Shay goes to work at the bar, and people are talking about a serial killer who has dropped a female body with a tattoo on the arm. At first she pays no mind to it because she is busy, until one man who is well dressed and polished makes a sound of disagreement with the men discussing the serial killer. She gives him another drink, and later that night, she goes to his hotel room where they have sex. As she sneaks out while he is asleep, she realizes that he is an FBI agent, and she freaks out. She returns home, grabs the hidden gun—the one that Max had used to shoot her father, and that would have implicated her—and goes to a junkyard on a route towards Galveston, where she stashes the gun in a Ford, where it may not ever be found, and if it is, it will not be tied to them. She returns home, surprising her brother, Beau, who has to head to his job at the hospital. Shay then has to take Max to meet with her psychiatrist, Dr. Tori Greene, whom she thinks that Max likes as much as Max may like any adult. That day Max asks for Shay to take them to Galveston, which has Shay’s heart racing because that was the direction she took to hide the gun. But they end up going and having a great time.

Kilkenny returns home and lets Raisa in, where they talk and she explains what she has found. He asks her to come with him to Houston, and she agrees to go with him. She meets him the next day at the airport, and he tells her that he had spoken with his bosses, and they told him to basically rent a boat until this dies down. As they fly, she asks him to tell her a little bit about Shay and he does. When they arrive to Houston, they are met by Xander Pierce, and they go to meet Nathaniel Conrad in prison. He tells them that he never killed Shay, and Raisa realizes that he knew her because he is formal with them, utilizing their formal titles, but he calls Shay by her first name. He doesn’t tell them who it is that murdered her, because he doesn’t want to do their job for them. So as they leave the prison, they decide to contact Kate Tashibi to get the records of her interview. Raisa stays back at the offices to review the letters, and the two men go together to get Kate and her interviews. As Raisa works through the letters, she doesn’t find more information at all about who could possibly be the writer of the second letters, but she starts taking a closer look at the victims—Shay, and two men, both of whom turn out to have been victims or apparent victims of violence in their childhood, just like Nathaniel. One had killed his mother’s brother in self defense, and another had escaped from a burning house that was started by the mother falling asleep while smoking. Nathaniel, on the other hand, had survived a poisoning—his father seemingly had poisoned their family, and Nathaniel had managed to throw up the poison, and survived in the cold with a broken leg, before he was found. Raisa calls Kilkenny, who tells her that she’s on speakerphone, and they weren’t able to get to Kate—but that Kate will meet them at the office and she’s stuck in traffic. They talk about the two men, which Pierce says weren’t really an anomaly at the time that they had been searching for the Alphabet Man, because he had kind of crossed many racial lines and they thought that maybe he would have done an experiment on gender—besides, there was the grey ink that he used in his tattoos that matched all of the bodies, which is the only detail that was never released to the media. She then speaks alone to Kilkenny who gives her the name of a journalist who worked with them. Raisa calls her sister, Delaney, and asks her to search in Houston for a set of parameters—men who had survived violent childhood episodes and ended up dead. She then called up the journalist and went to meet with him at a nearby bar, where she drank a bit of alcohol with him, and he said that his theory was that Pierce was the 2nd murderer, because to him those three deaths did not make any sense or fit the victims of the Alphabet Man. Delaney eventually comes back with several data points of men fitting those parameters, even going out a bit further than Texas to check for more, that she was able to find.

Shay wakes up one morning early, and takes a baseball bat to a strange man standing in her kitchen. Beau comes in, taking the bat out, and it turns out that the man is one of his coworkers—his car is in repair so Beau is picking him up and dropping him off at the hospital. Beau had spilled some coffee on the man, and had offered to bring him a shirt, which he hands to the man from the coat closet. Beau then invites Shay to go with them to visit Billy, who is Beau’s father—Shay, Beau and Max share the same mother but different fathers. Billy had drank two bottles of alcohol and ended up having his car wrapped around a tree, before ending up in a coma at the hospital. Beau’s paycheck goes towards paying for the medical bills. At some point throughout the years before her disappearance, Shay was bartending at her job when she saw Kilkenny, who in turn brought Pierce. She had taken a moment away from the bar, and runs into Nathaniel, who follows her out the door, and they talk for a brief moment. Shortly after she returns to the bar, her coworker walks out, claiming that she cannot handle the work. The girl is never seen again, and chats on social media channels wonder if she was one of the Alphabet Man’s victims that was never discovered. Some time later, Billy dies, and Shay tells Kilkenny to come to the funeral when they talk. At the funeral, Nathaniel speaks to Shay a bit, and Kilkenny interrupts them, after which the man dips out to speak with Beau. Kilkenny and Shay talk about Billy and Kilkenny wonders how a man who had been sober for a few years had drank two bottles of whiskey, and was able to get into a car, because his tolerance wouldn’t have been high after some years sober. And why would those bottles be found in the footwell of the car, not elsewhere, raising questions about whether or not Billy’s accident was really an accident.

Raisa gets back to the office before Kate makes it there. When Kate does get there, she is not willing to give up much of the raw footage for them to get through, and Kilkenny realizes that her excuse about getting stuck in traffic was on purpose so that they wouldn’t be able to get a warrant because the judges have closed shop for the day, unless he was able to get an emergency order from a judge to have her hand over the information. Ultimately, Pierce pressures her to leave behind the raw footage, telling her that he will cancel her meeting with Nathaniel before he is executed the next day. Kate gives it to them but tells them good luck. Knowing that they won’t have enough time to comb through all of the footage, Raisa goes after her, and asks her for information on the name. Kate only tells her that the first victim is the important one—which has Raisa questioning what happened for Nathaniel to kill the gas worker on his way from his interview in Houston. This leads her to wonder what happened in Houston that triggered him. As expected, they do not find any information on who the second killer might be in the videos.

Some time throughout the years before her kidnapping, Shay goes into Max’s room, and finds a box of newspaper cuttings from the Alphabet Man, which unnerves her. Beau finds her and tells her that Max is not a murderer and she probably has some interest in this—so she needs to talk to her. Shay does talk to her, and Max doesn’t say much before asking her if she really wants to know the truth. As a result of this, and how unbothered Max is, Shay speaks with Tori Greene about it, who tells her that there’s no one way for them when the psychopathy for serial killers begins—no one event that they can point to. The two ladies become fast friends. Shay attends a Christmas party with Kilkenny, and makes him drinks while she herself doesn’t drink at all. During the Christmas Party, Kilkenny steps away to his office to pick up a couple of files, and in that time, Pierce comes up to Shay and starts talking about getting her a license to carry a gun, and sign her up for things. It comes off to Shay as if Pierce is hitting on her, and when Kilkenny comes back, there is tension between the two, but Pierce quickly says good bye and makes an exit. The next morning, Kilkenny goes to give her more coffee, and realizes the mistake, because while Shay hasn’t said anything, he knows that she’s pregnant. He tells her that he thought she was going to make a big reveal out of it, but she didn’t—though she does confirm that she is pregnant. He tells her that he is happy. Shay then takes Max to Galveston to tell her the truth, but Max beats her to it, telling her that she had stopped drinking, which is a huge sign. Eventually Shay marries and moves to Washington to be with Callum, because his transfer to Texas got denied. She loses the baby, and one day Max shows up. She shows Shay information on the murders done by the Alphabet Man, and how all of the bodies were dump in a perfect circle more or less from the Hospital where Beau works, and that all of the disappearances happened within a much smaller circle of the hospital. Then Max tells her that Beau has come home late every time the women had disappeared and a few nights ago he had blood on his shirt, claiming that he helped a guy after a fist-fight. Shay doesn’t want to believe in it, because Beau is good to them, but Max reveals that it’s actually Beau who killed Max’s father, not her. They talk it through and realize that maybe it’s not Beau that killed all these women.

Shay talks Callum into taking time off, and they go to a beach together where they start out talking about Kilkenny’s job, but then talk about other things, and have a great time. Not long after Max’s visit, they go back to Houston for another of Kilkenny’s trips to help with the Alphabet Man case. While there, Shay follows Beau to a house that turns out to be empty, and she follows him in, only for him to tell her to get out. Unfortunately before she can leave, Pierce comes in and reveals that he has been asking Beau to help out with finding out more information on their mother—Hilary—who has gotten caught up with some bad things, specifically with men who are doing illegal things. He reveals that he started looking into their family after Shay started dating Kilkenny and seemed to fit the profile of a killer inserting himself into the investigation. Shay realizes that Pierce’s comments at the Christmas party were intended to try to drive a wedge between them, and when Shay asks about it, he reveals that he does not believe that someone like her, of a family like hers is worthy of Kilkenny. Beau leaves after her, and she heads to the car too when she hears a familiar voice, who turns out to be none other than Tori Greene. So they meet up later, and talk over wine—where Shay gets really drunk, and tells her that Max had showed up at her house in Washington thinking that Beau is the Alphabet Man, and she had come down to Texas to make things right between siblings. She starts to ask questions about Tori—why is she at the FBI building, and wonders about Tori’s expertise in children that went through a violent episode in losing their family.

Raisa, and Kilkenny head to the prison the next morning, and try to talk to Nathaniel into giving them the information, but they have to wait for a long while for Nathaniel to even be able to come visit them. So Raisa decides to go back to the letters and try a different cipher. She is able to find a second message within the letters using the second cipher. Pierce comes in and tells her that he’s going to Max Baker’s house, asking if she wants to come along. She tells him that she would rather stay behind and focus on this, before telling him what she’s discovered and that she might have someone who would do it much faster. He gives his blessing to have her take a look, and she calls Delaney, who gets to work on it. Just after that she gets the message from Kilkenny that Nathaniel is ready to see them. They talk to him, and he reveals that Kate had already come by—and also that the letters were sent to him by someone who thought they could stop him, which is why there was the mistake letter that revealed who he is, but he tries to play it off as he made a mistake. Nathaniel also tells Kilkenny that he wants them to be here for the final show, but then tells Kilkenny that he’s not that interested in him any more. This has Raisa moving into action, and going back to her whiteboard—Kilkenny following her. She explains everything to him, and when Delaney comes back with the information for the hidden ciphers, they realize that it was someone that had to have had contact with Nathaniel at some point. So they start digging into his background and his childhood, specifically after the death of his family. Raisa realizes that Nathaniel and Isabel are eerily similar in their way of thinking and doing—down to the fact that both families were poisoned. So they start digging into both files and they find out that Nathaniel had dealt with someone called Tori Greene, while Isabel (thanks to the files that Delaney had sent) had a psychiatrist called Victoria Langston. Raisa realizes that it’s the same person based on the similarity of the names, and research into Victoria shows that she had been doing research into children victims of extreme violence.

Kilkenny and Raisa call Pierce, but he is not picking up. So Kilkenny calls the office, and the assistant tells him that she hasn’t received an email about Max’s home address. This has them wanting to check the security cameras, where they realize that Pierce had walked into a room—the holding room where Nathaniel would have talked to Kate—and zeros in on a woman in the room, who turns out to be no one else but Max Baker. They follow her out, until she disappears behind a newspaper van, and Raisa decides to go check it out because she believes Max would have wanted to stay to see Nathaniel execute. Indeed, Max is sitting by a car, writing in a notebook, and she reveals that Tori was her psychologist, who started her session with Max—like with the many other children that she’d had over the years—working on word puzzles and ciphers. It took her some time to figure out that it was Tori that had killed Shay, but Max had done research on her and found her marriage certificate—Victoria Carter—but before that her full name, Victoria Langston. She tells Raisa that when Shay had been killed, Tori had come to her and told 16 year old Max to disappear, which she did because Tori knew something very few other people knew: Beau had been the one who pulled the trigger on her father, not Max. And she didn’t want him to be incriminated in anything, or behind bars. But this time, she made sure to get Beau far away from it, and to put Pierce in the same house so that there is an alibi, as she will protect Beau this time. Max finishes up writing a letter, hands it to Raisa to give to Nathaniel, and tells her that she’s sorry for Kate and the death of her sister, but that her sister was killed first, and then she gets into a car and drives off, which Raisa figures she would ditch at her earliest opportunity. Raisa takes the letter to the prison, and uses the second cipher to find out that Max had told Nathaniel that she had gotten to Tori Greene. They indeed find Tori dead in her car, in what appears to be suicide—and Raisa knows that they will not find anything on that gun to tie them to Max. Also, Beau and Pierce were in the same house, and Pierce later reveals to them that he had been running an investigation into the sibling’s mother, and that Shay had known about it because she was there for that one meeting they all had. He also reveals that he had called Tori Green to be a general consultant, to get a second opinion outside of Kilkenny’s profile on the Alphabet Man because he was frustrated that they were not closing it fast enough, but then there was one time that Tori was supposed to come and she never did, which could be when she ran into Shay.

During Kilkenny’s and Raisa’s drive to Galveston to celebrate the closure of the case, Raisa deciphers another message from Max—that it wasn’t happiness for Shay, but about family, and he was her family. Kilkenny is silent for a while after that. They celebrate and reflect on their families—including Raisa’s sisters, and she realizes that Isabel is a reminder of what she could be if she doesn’t work on it all the time; how Raisa could have turned out, and that in the end, maybe this was Isabel’s thank you to Kilkenny for saving her life three months prior.

My Thoughts: I really do enjoy this crime/ mystery story especially with the linguistic aspect. I do not feel as if it is as suspenseful as the first one, because we know that the murderer is already behind bars, but now we’re taking a look at the same case with additional details that we find out through Isabel, and Kate, and Nathaniel himself. I also did love the fact that we had Shay’s perspective in the book, but I wasn’t really a fan of Shay at all. I feel that Kilkenny wouldn’t be drawn to someone like Shay for the long term, and it’s kind of weird to me that Shay would just take off to Washington after marrying Kilkenny when she’s the guardian of Max, as I think that this would have to be okayed by the state or get some kind of things figured out for that guardianship, because the circumstances of the girl’s life changed with Shay being gone. So I don’t feel the romance between Kilkenny and Shay, and see it having worked out in the long term. I wonder if there is a chance though that Kilkenny’s and Raisa’s feelings might change towards each other—they work really well together, and seem to have an understanding with each other. Overall a lovely book and story, and I’m glad that they’ve figured out that there was a second murderer, and got that sorted out. Now I wonder what will happen in the this book when it comes out!