If You Tell

I’m going to give this book a good rating because it IS perfectly researched, with excellent story telling (it reads like fiction), and the writing is great BUT I don’t know that I can actually recommend this book as it has pretty much every trigger warning I can think of (particularly child abuse, body shaming, torture, murder, I could go on…), leaving me really, really upset and a little bit nauseous. This is the story of Shelly Knotek and her three daughters (+ random friends who joined the family at times but always somehow ended up disappearing). You can read more about Shelly/everything she did in this article… make your decision from there. The book is terrifying. I felt truly sick to my stomach by the end (though relieved as all three daughters made it out alive and seemingly have normal lives today). I know I read a lot of books that are dark and twisty… but they’re all fiction. I think that separation between fiction and reality is what makes me love my twisty thrillers. Knowing that this was real and actually happened to these girls (and the people who were murdered) was deeply upsetting. I read it as research for my friend Casey’s podcast. I’m excited for our episode to come out. If I hadn’t been reading it as research I probably would have stopped reading, instead I read it (all traumatic 400 pages of it) in just a couple days. Order on Bookshop.org or Amazon.