Someone We Know: A Novel

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