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I had forgotten the delight of a good proser until I read Elizabeth de Mariaffi's THE DEVIL YOU KNOW, and then, with the first line, the memory of delight was resurrected. Mariaffi's book is a smart, well-crafted study of the basic human fear of the unknown.
Dramatis personae: Lianne Gagnon, a teenaged girl who is murdered at the beginning of the novel and sets fear in motion; Evie Jones, Lianne's childhood friend, now a 21-year-old reporter at the Toronto Free Press who is assigned to investigate dead girls. Evie's parents, Annie, a bookkeeper, slightly unhinged; her father, a dentist, calm and caring; Paul Bernardo, 28, college graduate, accountant, blond heartthrob, and serial killer; a stalker in a hoodie who stands outside Evie's door at night in the snow; David Patton, a childhood friend; David's father, Graham, who seems to have the reek of criminality about him; Robert Cameron, an American who had been in the area when Lianne went missing.
Early in the novel, Evie, girl reporter, finds a photograph in microfilm files of the newspaper showing her mother and Robert Cameron in front of a house where her mother lived as a runaway. The owner of that house used runaway girls for sex and drugs, while offering them a home that, for some, was better than living with their birth families. There are other girls in the photograph. The photograph is torn. What is there, and what is missing beckons to Evie. She feels that that the image tells the truth about her murdered friend, and she begins to research her hunches.
However, THE DEVIL YOU KNOW is not really about a murdered girl and her loyal girlfriend, seeking to find a murderer and set the world to rights. It is about how serial killings - and their reporting in mass media - change societies forever. Mothers set curfews. Children disappear from the streets, brought indoors by worried parents. Children grow up never talking to strangers and looking over their shoulders. Fear becomes their companion, appearing dressed in a hoodie on the balcony, morphing into their friends' fathers, into every man speaking to every girl in every park, in their dreams, in the torn and missing images of photographs. Once fear enters, it becomes the protagonist in all narratives, the Boo Radleys in the houses down the street. The police can start a manhunt, going door-to-door, or they can storm the compound in Waco; the lawyers can make sure the murderer does not cop a plea. But fear, wherever it is caught and cuffed, always walks away on a procedural error.
§ Cathy Downs is professor of English at Texas A&M University—Kingsville and is a fan of the well-turned whodunit.
Reviewed by Cathy Downs, March 2015
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