Book Review: Say My Name by Joe Clifford

 

From the publisher:

SAY MY NAME is a true crime story about a crime that never happened. 

On the heels of a divorce, a midlist mystery writer returns to his hometown in Central CT and is dragged back into a decades’ old, unsolved case involving former missing classmates to expose the horrific secrets of a quaint, idyllic New England town.

Fusing the modern domestic psychological thriller with popular unsolved mysteries (Girl on the Train meets In Cold Blood), this meta blend of true crime and fiction plays with expectations and perspective before its mind-blowing conclusion.  

Say My Name by Joe Clifford was released June 6th, 2023.

My thoughts:  Say My Name by Joe Clifford is a strange book starting with the first line of the synopsis: "a true crime story about a crime that never happened." Things only get stranger with time as we watch the main character on a downward spiral while investigating the disappearance of a set of twins from when he was a youth in central Connecticut. 

The story is told from the main character's point of view. He is an unreliable narrator - he spends much of the book drinking heavily and not eating. This leads him to maybe make conclusions he wouldn't have made if he was sober. At least he questions some of them once he sobers up. I thought that the author did a good job of showing how the main character declines with time.

In order to read the book, I had to suspend disbelief early on and read it as a mystery that the main character was investigating. It's not a neat mystery. It reads like a real mystery would with messy investigations, strange conclusions, getting into trouble, and being told to leave things alone. Still, I read on wanting to know what would happen and what kind of conclusion he would draw next.

The ending of the book was a big twist. It wasn't the one I was expecting, which is a good thing. It's nice to be surprised. Still, I felt it was a little off in the way it was explained.

Overall, it's a good book. If you like your mysteries written weirdly, maybe experimentally, then this would be a good book for you. I gave it 4 out of 5 stars for execution. It was different. I didn't really like the narrator. I wasn't fond of the ending, but it was interesting.

I received a copy of the book through Swell Media. This did not affect my opinions.