As someone from and having a complicated relationship with her small town, I’m always fascinated at how fiction portrays the experience. In The Only One Who Knows, author Lisa M. Matlin doesn’t sugarcoat her fictional town filled with secrets—but she also doesn’t condemn it, either. Basically, she just lets it be both sides of the small-town experience, plus lots of sharks.
Minnow is living the dream: she’s rising in her career as a TV journalist, she’s got sweet digs in the big city far from her Podunk little coastal hometown, and she’s just gotten engaged to her attractive and successful fiancé. All three things swiftly crumble in dramatic fashion, and she flees with only a few belongings and her (slightly purloined) dog back to the aforementioned Podunk hometown: Kangaroo Bay, Australia. Like Min, a lot of things have changed in Kangaroo Bay, but fundamentally she and it are just the same as the day she left. Considering those things were exactly what she was trying to run away from, both in town and within herself, she could have picked a better place to lick her wounds.
Still, it’s hard not to slip right back into the rhythm of things. Her father might have disappeared when she was a child, just two years after her mother vanished, but her older brother has kept the family fishing business running. An old friend or two is still around, too, as are the parents who once seemed hopelessly older than she was. There’s a familiar face in Kangaroo Bay who shouldn’t be there, too—Chris, a fellow journalist who has come to investigate a string of disappearances, murders, and shark attacks that douse the small town in more than its share of blood. Caught between the two worlds of her profession and upbringing, Min can’t help but follow the threads, even if they lead back to events she’d rather forget. Even if they threaten the life she’s trying to rebuild for herself.
The Only One Who Knows is a swift-moving novel that manages to balance the stakes of a thriller with the strange contradictions and collision of past and present that often happens when returning to the place you grew up. “If there’s one place you can’t hide from yourself, it’s on the streets of your hometown,” Min says as she rolls back into Kangaroo Bay. Chris’s investigation coincides with her own reignited search for the truth of some of her darker moments from childhood, but his questions uncover more than she bargained for, forcing more of a reckoning than she intended.
This is the first I’ve encountered Matlin’s work, though I doubt it’ll be the last. It can be daunting to let characters be messy, especially those whose eyes we borrow to experience the story, but Matlin does so with earned confidence. Min witnessed more than her fair share of tragedy as a kid, but it doesn’t take long to find out that she wasn’t always a hapless bystander. Her compartmentalization of her truest self, and how it refuses to stay in the dark corners she shoved it when she remade herself, felt authentic to the character and to the kinds of ways a psyche can respond to trauma.
As much as I hate to join in the easy comparison to other women-written thrillers from recent (or somewhat recent) years, The Only One Who Knows is strongly reminiscent of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects in ways that go beyond the setup of a journalist returning home and finding out more than she intended from the past in her coverage of current events. This comparison isn’t to suggest The Only One Who Knows is derivative or some Temu version of another book. Its exploration of some facets of those similar themes, besides its Down Under backdrop and Min’s clear and refreshing voice, set it apart as a trip all its own.
Ring Reads 