BEFORE YOU KNEW MY NAME by Jacqueline Bublitz

 

A teenage girl's body found dumped on the rocks beside a river in New York City. Could there be a more anonymous or clichéd murder mystery to solve than this? And yet we know who the dead girl is from the first page, because she narrates the whole story. She is furious about what has happened to her, how dare some angry narcissitic bloke take her life away because he doesn't get what he wants. She is going to do all she can to bring her killer to justice. It sounds creepy, and a bit of the horror genre, but it is the complete opposite. There is nothing macabre about this at all. It reminded me very much of reading The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, turned into that beautiful movie by Peter Jackson. 

18 year old Alice Lee has run away to New York from some obscure nowhere place in Wisconsin, escaping an increasingly unpleasant situation she has found herself in with her school teacher. Alice has no parents to speak of, the only person truly looking out for her being her best friend. Why does she choose New York? It is the most far way place she can think of to go. And so she does. With the terrific optimism and hope that young people have, she finds a place to live - with a reclusive older man. The alarm bells would be clanging big time in the minds of us oldies, but no, it is a perfect place for Alice, allowing her to find a bit of herself, see a future, make some plans. 

But then it all goes wrong, and within weeks of arriving in New York, young, beautiful, talented and fearless Alice is dead. She was discovered by another runaway - 36 year old Ruby. Ruby is going through her own crisis, having uprooted herself from Melbourne to New York. Again because it is far away from everything she knows and she has never been before. What an adventure. Unlike Alice she has money so can live somewhere half way decent. But she knows no one, is depressed, disoriented, uncertain. Until she finds Alice. Ruby wants to know who this young woman was, how she came to be where she is, and with some magic direction from Alice, watching in the shadows, wanting her soul to be at rest and peace, she 'helps' Ruby bring the murderer to account. 

It is gripping, thrilling, quite different from any type of murder solving book you will ever read, and just terrific. I loved both these women - courageous, determined, true to themselves, united in the quest. It will make the best movie or TV series.