You Are Not Alone by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen
Wednesday, June 17, 2020 at 8:41AM 
Published by St. Martin's Press on March 3, 2020
Initially, You Are Not Alone seems to be the story of a revenge club, a group of women who are dedicated to avenging atrocities — or, at least, events that in their overwrought imaginations they define as atrocities. We are introduced to two sisters, Cassandra and Jane Moore, and four other women who are apparently dedicated to inflicted harm on the men who have done them a perceived injustice. But three of the six women quickly drop out of the story, leaving the Moore sisters and a woman named Valerie as the primary agents of vengeance. The story is not actually about their efforts to obtain what they view as justice, but to cover their rears when they think they are about to be caught.
The novel’s protagonist is Shay Miller, a woman with no job, no boyfriend, and no self-esteem. Shay is keeping a notebook filled with depressing facts that she calls her Data Book. Every chapter she narrates opens with a (usually depressing) fact from the Data Book. Maybe if she abandoned her gloomy book, she would feel better about life.
Early in the novel, Shay watches a woman named Amanda jump in front of a subway train. Shay spots and keeps Amanda’s necklace, the first in a string of improbable occurrences. For reasons apparently related to her general battiness, Shay leaves some flowers at Amanda’s apartment and then attends her funeral, where she meets the Moore sisters. For no obvious reason, Shay invents a story about how she knew Amanda.
The Moore sisters pretend to befriend Shay because they are worried that Shay might have learned something incriminating about Amanda that might link to the sisters. They only believe this because Shay is bizarrely behaving as if she had a connection to Amanda. All of that seems like a contrivance to set a plot in motion.
Shay is so needy that she gleefully accepts the sisters' friendship. The Moores are PR specialists who know artists and celebrities. They might be clones of Samantha Jones on Sex and the City. Since they are glamorous and Shay is not, Shay feels unworthy of their attention.
The sisters soon hatch a wildly improbable scheme to set up Shay for a crime committed by another revenge club member. The scheme depends on the happy coincidence that when Shay cleans herself up, she bears a strong resemblance to Amanda.
What is it in the psychological makeup of Cassandra, Jane, Valerie, and the other revenge-obsessed women that allows them to feel justified when they do awful things to the men who wronged them? The authors do little to make them credible characters. Cassandra and Jane are portrayed as having a sense of entitlement which, combined with their evil natures, might be a plausible reason to believe that they would seek revenge for wrongs that affect them personally. People with that psychological makeup don’t tend to care about wrongs done to others, so their motivation to encourage others to seek revenge struck me as thin.
You Are Not Alone lacks the energy that should flow through an engaging thriller. The story generates little suspense because, for all the rushing around and looking over her shoulder that Shay does, there is never a sense that she is in real danger. The novel’s other problem is that Shay isn’t terribly bright. When, near the novel’s end, it appears that someone is about to murder her, the reader will be wondering why she doesn’t understand what is about to happen and move away from the danger. Or the reader might not care because, as thriller characters go, Shay is screamingly dull. In any event, the reader will understand that Shay is in no danger at all, as the outcome of that scene is entirely predictable.
The plot encourages the reader to guess why and how Shay is being set up. The story was sufficiently effective to hold my interest. The novel earns a weak recommendation on that basis. Unfortunately, the novel’s merits are largely offset by its implausibility, its one-dimensional and unexciting characters, and its predictable climax.
RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS