Even Dead, She’s Dangerous
“My name is Lizzie Ouellette, and if you’re reading this, I’m already dead. Yes, dead.”
This is the first line in bestselling author Kat Rosenfield’s newest thriller, NO ONE WILL MISS HER.
Someone murdered Lizzie Ouellette, the daughter of the town’s junkyard owner. Stabbed her and cut off her nose. The whole town considered her trash—the junkyard girl. Fitting since she’d grown up next to the dump. They even nicknamed her “Junkyard Jezebel.”
As Lizzie admits, “I was no saint in life, but death has a way of making you honest. So, here’s my message from beyond the grave, the one I want you to remember. Because it will be important. Because I don’t want to lie. They all thought I had it coming. They were right.”
All signs point to her drug-addicted former-town-football-star, Dwayne, as the killer. He’s missing, after all.
Nothing like this had ever happened in Copper Falls, Maine, but State detective Ian Bird is determined to solve the mystery. If the killer wasn’t Dwayne, could it be one of Lizzie’s clients? Adrienne and Ethan Richards, a wealthy couple from Boston, were renting Lizzie’s lake cabin, and they are also missing. Ethan is even a criminal, “one of those fancy, white-collar bad guys who floats away on a golden parachute and lands gently in a pile of cash while the company he looted burns to the ground.”
Lizzie believed the elegant Adrienne was her friend—she shared her secrets with Lizzie. But then Lizzie realized that what she considered friendship was just Adrienne confiding in her because she didn’t care what Lizzie thought. “Confessing her sins to me was comfortable, liberating, precisely because I was nothing.”
As Bird conducts his investigation, he learns no one is who they seem. He tries to figure out what made Lizzie “such a unique combination of punching bag and pariah? Copper Falls was a place where your role was assigned early and permanently. Once people had decided who you were, they’d simply never allow you to be anyone else.”
Read the rest of my review and interview with Kat Rosenfield in The Big Thrill.
