What Have You Done?

by Shari Lapena

A farmer outside the small town of Fairhill, Vermont, observes turkey vultures circling over one of his fields. Investigating, he’s shocked to find the body of a naked teenage girl in one of his fields. She’s quickly identified as Diana Brewer, a pretty and popular local teenager. She has been strangled.

This is a close-knit community where everyone knows everyone. Diana lives with her mother, a nurse who works the night shift at a nearby hospital. Diana’s best friends are Riley, Evan and Cameron; they’ve been nearly inseparable since they were children, and just recently Diana and Cameron have become a couple.

Cameron picked up Diana for a drive the evening before, and dropped her back at her house around 11 pm. He watched to see that she got safely inside, then returned to his own family’s home, where his parents were already asleep.

This is what he tells the police. But his mother knows he actually arrived home after 1 am. She’s sure, though, that he was only trying to avoid blame for missing his 11:30 curfew. He couldn’t have killed Diana: he loved her too much.

Police question Cameron, but they have other leads too. They discover that a customer at Home Depot, where Diana worked part-time, was persistently harassing her. And they also learn that Diana had complained to her high school principal about the gym teacher, who she said had been giving her inappropriate attention.

And a neighbour saw a truck parked outside Diana’s house around midnight.

As the story unfolds, it’s presented from several characters’ points of view, uncovering layers of secrets and motivations hidden beneath the surface of this close-knit community. Suspense builds as the author delivers twist after twist. And I didn’t see the final solution coming.

What Have You Done? is Shari Lapena’s eighth domestic thriller.  Her first, The Couple Next Door, became a runaway success when it came out in 2016.

Lapena was an avid reader since childhood, loving books by Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Daphne Du Maurier, and Patricia Highsmith among others.  But becoming a writer didn’t seem a practical career choice; instead she worked as a lawyer and then as an English teacher. When she had her first child she became a stay-at-home mother, and—as many other women authors have done—she found a way to carve out writing time in between her family activities.   

Her first novel, Things Go Flying, was published by a small Canadian press in 2007 (the year she turned 47) followed by Happiness Economics two years later. She describes these books as “literary comedies.” Both novels were well-received in Canada, nominated for literary awards, but had only modest sales and had no profile internationally.  

That changed with The Couple Next Door, her first suspense novel. Lapena says she wrote it in secret, not telling anyone she was writing a thriller because she wasn’t sure she could do it. But when it was published in 2016, it flew to the top of bestseller lists including the New York Times list, and since then she’s written a new thriller every year, adding A Stranger in the House, An Unwanted Guest, Someone We Know, The End of Her, Not a Happy Family, and Everyone Here is Lying. All of them have appeared on numerous bestseller lists, including those of the New York Times and the UK Sunday Times, and have sold in thirty-five territories around the world.

Lapena lives with her husband on a farm near Coburg, Ontario.

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