Complicit by Stephanie Kuehn (review)

It’s been two years since Jamie saw his beloved but frightening older sister, Cate, incarcerated in juvenile detention after setting fire to a barn and nearly killing a girl caught in the inferno. Now Cate’s out, and she’s taunting Jamie with phone calls that hint at a shared secret, and episodes of vandalism and destruction in the area suggest that she’s gone back to her old ways. Meanwhile, Jamie’s falling hard for a girl, Jenny, and trying to understand the childhood history he’s forgotten and the reason behind his apparently psychosomatic bouts of complete numbness in his hands—is this a result of his covering up for his sister? Kuehn ( Charm & Strange, BCCB 9/13) concocts an enjoyable and cinematic suspense thriller, with a dramatic backstory for Jamie and Cate (their birth mother was murdered when Jamie was only six, and they were subsequently adopted). Cate is a wonderfully witchy antagonist, and the twists and turns are ably doled out, with a few foreshadowing moments of what’s to come. While Kuehn’s overselling of the cover story means that the truth doesn’t explain everything, that doesn’t really matter in the heat of the horrific, catastrophic, and literarily delicious unraveling of the lies. This would be an excellent next step from or precursor to Werlin’s similarly twisty The Killer’s Cousin(BCCB 9/98).