Summary:
In I’d Know You Anywhere, Walter Bowman kidnaps fifteen-year-old, Elizabeth and holds her hostage for almost six weeks. He has killed at least two other girls, yet lets Elizabeth go for reasons known only to him. Now years later he is on death row for the murder of his last victim.
Now a grown woman, Elizabeth has changed her name to Eliza, married and had children, and shed her old identity as the rape victim and former hostage. Then she receives a letter from Walter. As his death comes near, he seems contrite.
But is that the only thing he is after? Is he finally willing to confess to murdering other girls? Or is he intent on forcing Eliza to remember everything that happened that summer, remember the truth of all that happened, to gain the upper hand and possibly stay his execution?
This is a well-written thriller.
What didn’t work for me:
Eliza comes across as passive.
Quite a few reviewers mentioned this, so I won’t elaborate on the details.
But psychologically, Eliza’s passivity makes sense. As a kidnapping victim, she went along with whatever Walter wanted; she learned to be passive as a way to survive. (My mom worked with a woman who had been abducted. From what my mom says, this woman sounds much like Eliza: passive, don’t rock the boat, excuse others’ poor behavior, don’t assert yourself because you might get hurt.)
Sure, it’s been fifteen years since the kidnapping. But it can take a lifetime (if ever) to undo the effect of a trauma like this. So while I normally dislike passive characters, I think it works for this particular plot and I think Lippman made the conscious choice to make Eliza this way.
What worked for me:
1. For once, a dual timeline that is effective!
The narrative changes from the present time to the terrible summer when Walter held Elizabeth hostage, and Lippman does a fine job building suspense through this. Each time I seemed to be close to reading all that happened—particularly with Holly, his last victim, and Elizabeth’s rape—Lippman left me hanging and desperate to read on to find out the truth. (I read this in one afternoon, which is unusual for me.)
2. POV characters who have their own agendas.
The emotions run high. Eliza is torn between her desire to leave the past behind and her desperation to protect her family from Walter’s unpredictable actions. Lippman gives us the voices of the grown Eliza; the young Elizabeth; Walter; his last victim’s mother; and a woman named Barbara, who, for counter-intuitive reasons of her own, helps him contact Eliza and is obsessed with staying Walter’s execution.
Getting inside Walter’s head is fascinating, as his view of the world is entirely warped. The way he manipulates others around him is disturbing: Elizabeth/Eliza, his other victims, Barbara. Fascinating and frightening.
Fascinating because it opens the mind of a depraved and violent mind to the rest of us.
Frightening because it points me to the unsettling question of how much do I, any of us, justify our misdeeds and manipulations of others. A question to ponder.
3. Little foul language, explicit violence or sexual content.
Lippman alludes to the violent deaths but never describes them and leaves most of the rape scene to the imagination. The technique makes Walter’s crimes all the more horrifying. Effective, and a way that I wish many other writers of crime novels would take note of. That’s not to say that there’s never a time for explicit content, but less is more.