I KNOW WHAT YOU DID

A bestselling crime novel’s dedication—“I know what you did, Petal Woznewski. Now everyone else will too”—comes to the attention of a reader named Petal Woznewski.

Not that anybody calls her Petal anymore. Gus Johnson, her friend with intermittent benefits, and everyone else goes along with her wish to be called Petta. But back when she was a teenager who’d just transferred to West High School after her parents’ suicides left her to be raised by her aunt Shelly, a retired physics professor at the University of Wisconsin, she was known as Petal to the few people who knew her at all. Their number included Megan Hollister, a 14-year-old from a well-to-do family, and Jenny Isaacs, her much less well-off best friend. Megan and Jenny took the newcomer under their wings, sharing their gossip and sneaking off late at night to hang out with beer, weed, and each other. All of that ended abruptly when Megan died in a freak accident that Jenny and Petal covered up their involvement in. Thirty years later, the pseudonymous ME Littleton has claimed in No One Suspected that Jenny, renamed Izzy Jacobs, watched in horror as Megan, renamed Miriam Rowley, was stabbed to death by Petal. Who is ME Littleton? Why are they hurling this false but painful accusation at Petal after all this time? And why is she the only character whose distinctive name hasn’t been changed, making her ridiculously easy to trace? Returning to her stomping grounds, she starts asking questions that quickly make things much more dangerous, even if the answers aren’t nearly as gripping.

A hook so irresistible that it hardly matters that the line and sinker don’t live up to it.