Alafair Burke | THE NOTE Spoilers

The Book: 

The Note by Alafair Burke
Published January 7, 2025 by Knopf
Date read: December 1, 2024

Find more January 2025 releases here.

The Note spoilers can be found below, but they’re hidden under a spoiler tag so you’re safe to keep scrolling if you’d just like to read my review.

The Characters: 

May, Lauren, and Kelsey

Rating: 3 out of 5.

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The Plot (from Goodreads):

A vacation in the Hamptons goes terribly wrong for three friends with a complicated history.

It was meant to be a harmless prank.

Growing up, May Hanover was a good girl, always. Well-behaved, top of her class, a compulsive rule-follower. Raised by a first-generation Chinese single mother with high expectations, May didn’t have room to slip up, let alone fail. Her friends didn’t call her the Little Sheriff for nothing.

But even good girls have secrets. And regrets. When it comes to her friendship with Lauren and Kelsey, she’s had her fair share of both. Their bond—forged when May was just twelve years old—has withstood a tragic accident, individual scandals, heartbreak and loss. Now the three friends have reunited for the first time in years for a few days of sun and fun in the Hamptons. But a chance encounter with a pair of strangers leads to a drunken prank that goes horribly awry. 

When she finds herself at the center of an urgent police investigation, May begins to wonder whether Lauren and Kelsey are keeping secrets from her, testing the limits of her loyalty to lifelong friends.

What had they gone and done?

The Note is a page-turner of the highest order from one of our greatest contemporary suspense writers.

The Note Spoilers

Click here for THE NOTE spoilers
Book spoilers ahead–if you haven’t yet read The Note, I suggest you turn back now.



May’s scandal was that she had a panic attack in a subway station during covid and went crazy at a man telling her to “go back where she came from” (except she had accidentally yelled at the wrong person and it was all caught on camera. Since she worked for the DA’s office, it blew up. Kelsey’s was that she was accused of killing her husband. Lauren’s was that she was having an affair with the owner of their arts camp, who was a big name in the art world, and that she had essentially slept her way to the top.

The three met at camp when they were young: May and Kelsey were campers and Lauren was their counselor. A girl died in their final year at the camp and Lauren was the scapegoat.

On their first night in the Hamptons, the women went out for drinks in Sag Harbor. Someone stole the parking spot they were waiting for, and they joked about leaving a note on his car to tell him he was an asshole. Lauren wrote a note saying “he’s cheating, he always does” and Kelsey left it on the car. Later, the same man wound up missing. The women saw a missing flyer the next day and freaked out. May went back to the restaurant and asked if they had cameras, so the police were able to track her down.

The Reveal:

Kelsey had been dating that man, David Smith. She was the one he was cheating on. She swore she didn’t kill him, but May thought she had.

Actually, Kelsey’s stepbrother Nate had killed them. Nate was in love with Kelsey even though they were stepsiblings. He’d been killing people to protect Kelsey for their whole life: starting with Marnie, the girl from camp, who had seen them kissing in the woods. He also killed both Kelsey’s husband and Dave by posing as a police officer and then shooting them in their cars.

May devised a scheme to get him to confess by saying they thought it was Kelsey’s father who had killed both men and wearing a wire for the conversation. The cops got what they needed, but Kelsey pushed Nate too far and he jumped off May’s balcony rather than face the music.

The Ending:

In the epilogue, Kelsey got pregnant with her embryos. May broke up with Josh and started seeing Carter (the detective). Lauren kept dating Thomas.



I hope these The Note spoilers were helpful.

The Review: 

Thank you to PRHAudio for this gifted ALC!

I was immediately drawn in by the premise of this book–three longtime friends reconnecting on vacation, each with a questionable past. I’m a big fan of vacation/girls trip thrillers, and I couldn’t wait to see what secrets these characters were hiding.

The author lost me somewhat partway through, though. A stupid lie to the cops over something totally innocuous is always a quick way to lost my belief in the story (although the lie was somewhat explained later on). From there, the characters just kept doing things I didn’t think a rational person would ever do.

There are some interesting reveals throughout the story, but I wasn’t in the right headspace to suspend belief enough to play along. The way things came together didn’t ring true to me.

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