Alice Feeney | I Know Who You Are

The Book:

I Know Who You Are by Alice Feeney, 2019

The Characters:

Aimee Sinclair, actress
Her husband Ben Bailey
Her co star Jack
Her competition Alicia White

The Plot (from the publisher):

Meet Aimee Sinclair: the actress everyone thinks they know but can’t remember where from.

Except one person. Someone who knows Aimee very well—and what she’s done. . .

When Aimee comes home and discovers her husband is missing, she doesn’t seem to know what to do or how to act. The police think she’s hiding something and they’re right, she is—but perhaps not what they thought. Aimee has a secret she’s never shared, and yet, she suspects that someone knows. As she struggles to keep her career and sanity intact, her past comes back to haunt her in ways more dangerous than she could have ever imagined.

Click here for book spoilers for I Know Who You Are

Book spoilers ahead–if you haven’t yet read I Know Who You Are, I suggest you turn back now.

The Twist:

Aimee was kidnapped as a child by a couple (Maggie and John Sinclair) who wanted to replace their lost girl. Her name used to be Kira. Maggie and John abused her and basically used her as a slave. She thought Maggie had died when someone robbed their store, but someone looking like Maggie is still alive and has been holding a grudge against Aimee all these years.

Aimee is accused of killing her husband but when the news articles come out, the man she has been accused of killing is not the man she married.

“Maggie” set the whole thing up. The real Ben Bailey had killed himself after losing his job. She buried Ben’s body under their porch and took steps to frame Aimee.

“Maggie” isn’t Maggie. She is Eamonn, Aimee’s brother from before she was kidnapped. The same person is also the man that Aimee married, posing as Ben Bailey.

I guessed that Maggie was a man or trans, but I thought she was John Sinclair, not the brother! He was dressing as Maggie to freak Aimee out and hide from the police, but the plastic surgeries were to make him look more like Aimee’s co-star, Jack.

The Ending:

Aimee tries to escape, he chases her, and she finds an ax and kills him. He got her pregnant, but she pretends the baby is Jack’s and they end up together. Alicia, Aimee’s nemesis, strangely disappeared, so she got the lead in an important movie.

The Review:

I loved Alice Feeney’s other two books (Sometimes I Lie and His and Hers), but this one fell a little bit flat for me. I’m generally willing to suspend belief somewhat for thrillers in order to enjoy the story, but too many aspects of this one were just way too far fetched. Also, in going for the shock factor, I think she went a little too far. There’s a line between shocking and just plain old gross!

Click here for book spoilers

The incest bit always turns me off to a story. Luckily this didn’t come out earlier, or this one would’ve been a DNF.

I have a hard time accepting that the cops didn’t realize that Ben Bailey had died two years earlier. Wouldn’t his identity be tied to the title of his house, which would lead them to his death certificate? How did Eamonn exhume his body and bring it across country borders without throwing up some red flags? How did he bury it in the yard without Aimee noticing (unless he did this before they moved in, I can’t remember)?

How did Eamonn manage to look like Maggie and Jack at the same time? If he was getting surgeries to look like Jack, wouldn’t his male features prevent him from looking like Maggie? Something was also off about the timeline of him recovering from the surgeries, since I thought the book took place over a week or two.

Finally, why wasn’t Aimee concerned at all that her husband was missing? Sure, he was abusive and she wanted a divorce, but I feel like I would still be more interested in what happened to him.