Someone We Know: A Novel

Shari Lapena

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 7

Chapters 8-15

Chapters 16-23

Chapters 24-31

Chapter 32-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Cell Phones

Content Warning: The source text contains a graphic description of murder, as well as instances of substance use disorder and sexuality.

Over the past few decades, technology has altered not only people’s lives but also the plotting of stories, notably mysteries and thrillers. However, the complacency that cell phones foster generates its own hazards. The characters in Someone We Know, a rogue’s gallery of cheating spouses, murderers, liars, computer hackers, and other wrongdoers, try to hide their guilty secrets by using smart phones or burner phones: No longer must offenders in fiction risk exposure through meetings, letters, written documents, or landlines. Unfortunately for them, the ease of this technology, and its illusion of absolute privacy, leads to their undoing. Teenage housebreaker Raleigh Sharpe casually texts a friend about his misdeeds, secure in the knowledge that his phone is password-protected; he forgets that new texts appear on the screen even when the phone is locked—which is how his mother finds out about his crimes. His neighbor, Amanda Pierce, uses a pay-as-you-go “burner phone” for the anonymity it offers; however, once her suspicious husband finds the phone, it gives him access to her lovers’ burner-phone numbers, one of which he calls, and recognizes Larry Harris’s voice. Later, an unknown third person (perhaps Becky Harris) digs the phone out of the garden where he has buried it, potentially exposing Robert’s own dark secrets, recorded on it by Amanda.

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Another smart phone feature that puts privacy at risk is its location history. This causes trouble for Paul Sharpe, whose alibi rests on his claim that he visited his aunt on the night of Amanda’s murder: Unfortunately, he turned his phone off to save power—not only voiding his alibi, but making his story doubly suspicious to the police. Merely owning a smart phone, then, puts one in a double-bind: Its locations can easily be tracked by law enforcement, but if the phone is turned off or left at home, the police will wonder why. As the ruined lives and shattered marriages in Someone We Know illustrate, cell phones symbolize the illusion of absolute privacy and isolation that the suburbanites believe they live in.

Lies

Virtually all of the characters in Someone We Know engage in lies or deception of some sort, primarily to conceal their own or someone else’s misdeeds. These dishonesties, large and small, seem almost intrinsic to the novel’s suburban setting, where big yards and detached houses offer privacy from the ears and eyes of neighbors, though not as much as the owners may think. Also, the tedium, cultural blandness, and sense of isolation of suburban life may contribute to the allure of risky enterprises such as extramarital affairs, housebreaking, and computer hacking, which must then be covered up with lies. In the novel, Robert and Amanda Pierce, after only two years of marriage, have already settled into a pattern of mutual deception and passive aggression, whose extent and severity seem only hinted at by the author. So much of their married life is governed by lies and insincerity that they both pretend, even in private, that nothing is amiss: Robert never confronts Amanda about her flirting or affairs, and she pretends not to miss her secret phone, which he has found and stolen. Meanwhile, both Larry Harris and Keith Newell lie to their families and the police to cover up their affairs with Amanda, as does Becky Harris to conceal her fling with Robert Pierce. Becky also schools her husband on how to lie to the police about where and when he disposed of his burner phone.

Raleigh Sharpe lies both to his parents and the police about the true extent of his housebreaking and hacking, and his parents, in turn, go to great lengths to conceal the two crimes that he has confessed to them. Similarly, both Keith and Glenda Newell lie to protect their son—and Glenda goes so far as to murder a possible witness, with little sign of remorse. Only under the scrutiny of a murder investigation does this web of lies and deceit begin to break down. Toward the end, even the two detectives, Webb and Moen, succumb to lying when they trap Glenda Newell with the false claim that her husband has fully confessed to finding the Sharpe cabin locked when he returned after the murder. Equally, by the account of Someone We Know, deception and lies are as common in suburbia (or at least in Aylesford) as anywhere else in the world.

Gossip

Where secrecy and/or boredom prevails, gossip, too, will proliferate, and much of the action of Someone We Know consists of ordinary people sharing scandalous knowledge, rumors, or theories about their neighbors. At the weekly book club frequented by many of the neighborhood women, news of Amanda Pierce’s murder sparks speculation about her husband’s possible culpability, as well as memories of his late wife’s shameless flirting with their husbands, who groveled before her like “fools.” At the same meeting, one of the women spreads the news of the anonymous letter Olivia wrote to Carmine Torres about her son’s break-in, which Carmine has been showing around the neighborhood. Carmine, a bored older woman who lives alone, “loves a good gossip” (60). Hearing this, Olivia immediately regrets having written the letters; she had forgotten how quickly information meant to be confidential spreads in the small world of the suburbs. Later, Becky Harris tells Olivia that she saw her husband Paul “fighting” with Amanda in a parked car late at night, implying an affair, and undermining Olivia’s trust in her husband. (In turn, Olivia tells her friend Glenda Newell about Becky’s affair with Robert Pierce.) Confronted by Olivia, Paul tells her that he was merely warning Amanda to “back off” after catching her giving oral sex to Larry Harris in his office; Olivia then passes this morsel of gossip on to Glenda. Finally, after her son describes to her Keith Newell’s secret emails to another woman, which he hacked from the Newell computer, Olivia tells Glenda about them, adding that she suspects the other woman was Amanda.

In a matter of days, the residents of Aylesford have turned on each other, dragging each other’s dirty secrets into the open, largely due to one event: the murder of Amanda, which has fueled rampant speculation and paranoia in the once placid community. With few exceptions, they have not done this maliciously, but mostly as a way of determining how the murder could have happened and who might be at risk. But in the case of Carmine Torres, the web of gossip turns deadly, after Carmine taunts Adam Newell in front of his mother about seeing him stagger drunkenly down her street one night. Misinterpreting Carmine’s knowledge, and knowing her to be an inveterate gossip, Glenda Newell decides to shut her mouth for good.