🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 3.8/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥 | Standalone
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read Someone Knows yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
Vi Keeland doing psychological thriller? I was fully in from the jump. Someone Knows has a premise that pulls you directly into paranoia, and it delivers on the tension even if the ending left me with a lot of feelings. A lot of unresolved, frustrated, borderline furious feelings.
The Full Story Summary — Spoilers Included
Meet Elizabeth
Elizabeth is an English teacher in New York with a very complicated past she has spent a very long time outrunning. She has two bright spots in her life. First is Mr. Hank, her elderly former landlord who took her in like a daughter when she first moved to New York and who now lives in a care home with memory issues she visits regularly. Second is Sam, her detective “fuck buddy” who is decidedly more emotionally invested than she is. She only wants sex. He wants more. He’ll settle.
One of her teaching assignments asks students to write the first chapter of a book. She opens a submission from a student named Hannah Greer and the story is not fiction. It’s about a woman named Jocelyn, her teacher Mr. Sawyer, their affair, and how Elizabeth killed him. Elizabeth, who has spent twenty years pretending none of it happened, is now staring it all down in a student essay.
Someone Back Home Knows
Elizabeth traces the email address Hannah’s submission came from and it leads back to her old hometown. Someone there knows, and they’re sending it through a fake student identity.
She makes up with Sam after initially freezing him out for running a background check on her, because she needs to keep him close. She reaches out to Ivy, one of her two old best friends she hasn’t spoken to in twenty years, because she needs someone who was there. Ivy initially brushes the submission off as coincidence when Elizabeth shows her, right up until Elizabeth makes her read the next chapter. Then Ivy is very convinced, and they’re both panicking trying to figure out who could possibly know.
Going Home
Elizabeth decides she needs to go back. Right away things get messier. Her mom, who she hasn’t spoken to in years, is dying. She tries to leave and her mom collapses and ends up in the ICU. She runs into Lucas at the hospital, an old connection from years ago who works there.
At a bar, she meets Noah. She screws him in the bathroom. Then finds out his last name is Sawyer. He is Mr. Sawyer’s son. The son of the man she killed. So that’s fine. Totally fine.
Back at her mom’s house, Noah shows up to return the credit card she left at the bar. She lets him in. The paranoia is already fully activated at this point, and she starts running through her suspects: Noah, Lucas, Noah, Lucas. Meanwhile she’s getting phone calls with just breathing on the line.
She goes to visit Ivy, who is rightfully a little icy given that Elizabeth is acting like they just grab coffee all the time when they haven’t spoken in two decades. But they compare notes. Ivy brings up the Saint Agnes pendant mentioned in the story, and Elizabeth makes her read another chapter until Ivy is fully on board. Ivy’s strategy: why don’t you just go get Noah drunk at the bar and see if he talks? So Liz does exactly that.
The Investigation at Sawyer’s House
Noah invites her over to his parents’ old house, which he’s renovating. She pretends to be interested in him while really wanting to search the place. He gives her a tour and takes her into his father’s old office. The second he steps away, she goes through everything. She finds nothing.
Her mom gets out of the hospital. Elizabeth decides she’s going back to New York. Noah asks for her number.
Back in New York, she comes home and knows immediately that someone has been at her desk. Her chair is wrong. Everything feels off. The stalking is no longer just digital. Sam comes over and tells her he widened the search on Jocelyn Burton and found three matches: one too old, one too young, one in prison for manslaughter. He shows her a photo of the woman in prison. It’s not Jocelyn. Dead end.
The Flashbacks
Running alongside everything in the present are flashbacks to what actually happened with Mr. Sawyer, and they are dark and they are important.
He was her teacher. When she was sixteen years old, he groomed her under the guise of academic discipline, making her kneel while she read her work to him and telling her she needed more sessions to improve. He convinced her that if anyone ever found out, she’d lose her scholarship opportunity and he wouldn’t be able to help her anymore. He gave her an address and told her to show up Thursday. It wasn’t his house. It was a cheap motel. He made her strip to her bra and panties. Had her kneel. Then when she was getting dressed, he slapped her across the face and told her not to dress like a whore next time.
The Twist
This is the one that got me.
Elizabeth tries to look up Jocelyn in her old yearbook. Jocelyn isn’t in it anywhere. But when she looks up her own photo, her listed nickname is Jocelyn. Elizabeth IS Jocelyn.
She had completely dissociated and blocked out this entire chapter of her life. She has no memory of a therapy appointment from two decades ago, and when she tracks down the therapist and makes an appointment, the therapist confirms she was seen. Mr. Hank had brought her in because she wasn’t sleeping. During those sessions, she talked about a relationship with an older man and gave her name as Jocelyn. She fractured herself into two identities to survive what happened and then forgot the fracture entirely. All of Mr. Hank’s confused comments about her being in the hospital start making terrible sense.
The Spiral Continues
She ends things with Sam. She stops by Noah’s unannounced and finds him writing a thriller he’s been working on for a couple of years and feeling very inspired by. Then she spots a Saint Agnes pendant around his neck, same as the one described in the chapters, and that seals it for her. She’s convinced it’s him. She gets out of there fast.
Lucas at the hospital tells her that Noah had visited her mom twice while she was in the ICU. The first time her mom was asleep, the second time they actually spoke. Why would Noah Sawyer be at her dying mother’s bedside? Another layer of unsettling.
A flashback fills in what happened at the motel the night Jocelyn lost consciousness. She thinks she sees someone through the curtains. Mr. Sawyer rushes her out, makes her hide in the back of the car, takes her to a walk-in clinic in the next town where no one would recognize them. While she’s being stitched up, she remembers that he pushed her. The clinic runs a standard pregnancy test. Jocelyn is pregnant. The following week she tells Mr. Sawyer and he is genuinely elated, talking about running away and starting a life together, being gentle with her for once. They leave together and he pushes her down the stairs. She miscarried the next morning.
Back at Noah’s
Knowing Noah has left town, Elizabeth goes back to his house. He said the front door lock was broken but it’s locked now. She gets in through the back. Goes to his room. And finds a box of Polaroid photos with years written at the bottom. Many girls. Her. Ivy. All of them.
Noah appears behind her. She completely loses it, going through the whole house, calling him out, demanding to know where the journal is because there has to be a journal. That is the only way “Hannah Greer” would know everything she knows. Noah denies everything. Says he found the photos when he started remodeling the bathroom.
Then she tells him she killed his father. She hit him over the head with a lamp. And Noah says: my father was strangled. She didn’t kill him. She never killed him.
Days pass and she’s really spiraling. A lawyer arrives with the will: house and car go to the church, everything of value is donated. He hands her a sealed envelope she tosses in the trash.
While cleaning out her mom’s house, she finds her old notebook hidden in the bed. Her mom knew. All of it. She digs the letter out of the trash. In it, her mom admits to killing Mr. Sawyer. Which she believes also means her mom was Hannah Greer. Her mom sent those chapters. Her mom is dead, so there’s nothing to follow up on there.
Almost a year later, Elizabeth is moving forward. She’s going on a date with Noah.
In a final chapter from Noah’s perspective, his book is being published. A publisher asks whether the main character finding the journal in the mom’s bed means the mom did it. Noah says maybe, or maybe it was someone who wanted revenge for the twenty years of suffering his mom went through after her husband was killed and she found the journals. He donated a large statue to a church Liz recently visited. When they call to ask whose name to put on it, he first says anonymous, then changes his mind. He’ll use his sister’s name: Hannah Greer Sawyer.
He’s still doing it. Still going after her.
The Ending Explained — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Disappointed….
Noah’s sister being Hannah Greer, and Noah being the actual bad guy here is a solid structural twist, and I respect it. The idea that her own mother knew, carried the secret, and killed the man who hurt her daughter is genuinely interesting as well.
But what really got me is that final chapter from Noah. He is still, actively, going out of his way to psychologically torment Elizabeth. Donating a statue and naming it after his sister Hannah Greer Sawyer just so Liz will see it and know he’s there at the church. This man saw those Polaroids. He knows what his father was. He knows Elizabeth didn’t kill him. He knows she was a child. And he is still doing this.
I don’t get it. I really, truly do not get it. And not in a way that feels intentional or thought-provoking. In a way that feels like the author wanted a lingering menace ending and didn’t fully think through whether Noah’s motivation holds up under any amount of scrutiny. It doesn’t.
Best Part of This Book
The Jocelyn reveal. The moment Elizabeth opens that yearbook and sees her own nickname staring back at her, everything clicks into place so cleanly. Vi Keeland laid that groundwork quietly across the whole first half of the book without it ever feeling like a cheat.
Worst Part of This Book
Noah. And I need to say this clearly.
Elizabeth did not do anything that deserved years of psychological torture. She was sixteen years old. She was groomed, abused, manipulated by a man who held her academic future over her head and used it to do whatever he wanted to her. She didn’t even kill his father. She hit him with a lamp. Someone else strangled him. Noah knows this. He found out, looked her in the face, and continued anyway.
He found those Polaroids. He saw what his father was. He saw photos of girls, including Elizabeth, including Ivy. And he still decided that the right thing to do was to spend years crafting a campaign to make this woman’s life a living nightmare. His mom spent twenty years depressed after finding the journals after his father died. That’s a tragedy for his mom. But Elizabeth did not cause his mother’s pain. His father did. His father was a predator who abused his position over children and kept souvenirs of it.
There is no justifying Noah. His dad was a bad guy. His dad took advantage of children. The fact that Noah’s mom found the journals and suffered for it does not make Elizabeth responsible for a single moment of that. She was one of those children.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
Steam Rating: 🔥🔥🔥
- Sex? Yes
- Open or closed door? Open door and closed door
- Descriptive? Somewhat
- How much? Some, but also sexual abuse lightly described
There are scenes between Liz and Sam and Liz and Noah, written with detail. It’s not all completely explicit but it’s not fade to black either. The casual physical nature of how Liz connects with people actually says a lot about her character and the walls she keeps up, so it fits. Sex not feelings.
Would I Relisten?
No. The identity twist is one of those things that only works fresh, and Noah’s ending arc is not something I need to revisit. I think Vi Keeland writes a genuinely compelling psychological mystery in the first two-thirds of this book, and if you’re someone who can let a frustrating villain justification slide, you’ll probably enjoy the ride more than I did by the end.
Who Is This For
If you love dual-timeline psychological thrillers with a slow-burn identity mystery and a legitimately surprising midpoint reveal, this one is worth the read. Just know going in that it deals with grooming, abuse of a minor, and pregnancy loss, and that the villain’s final chapter may leave you more aggravated than satisfied. Thriller readers who need clean accountability might want to manage their expectations.
Where to Get This Book
📚 Physical Book
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Bookshop.org
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📱 Ebook
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Genre: Psychological Thriller | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥