Book ~ "No One Can Know" (2024) Kate Alice Marshall

From Goodreads ~ Emma hasn't told her husband much about her past. He knows her parents are dead and she hasn't spoken to her sisters in years. Then they lose their apartment, her husband gets laid off and Emma discovers she's pregnant - right as the bank account slips into the red.

That's when Emma confesses that she has one more asset: her parents' house, which she owns jointly with her estranged sisters. They can't sell it but they can live in it. But returning home means that Emma is forced to reveal her secrets to her husband: that the house is not a run-down farmhouse but a stately mansion and that her parents died there.

Were murdered.

And that some people say Emma did it.

Emma and her sisters have never spoken about what really happened that night. Now her return to the house may lure her sisters back but it will also crack open family and small-town secrets lots of people don’t want revealed. As Emma struggles to reconnect with her old family and hold together her new one, she begins to realize that the things they have left unspoken all these years have put them in danger again.

Fifteen years ago Juliette, Emma and Daphne's parents were found murdered in their house and though they couldn't prove it, everyone thought Emma did it. Juliette was old enough to take off and Emma and Daphne were put into foster care. The sisters have had no contact, by choice, since the murder.

Now married and pregnant, Emma and Nathan, her husband, have no choice to but to move back into her childhood house she still owns with her sisters as Nathan recently lost his job and Emma's not working. That's when Nathan realizes that there is a lot about Emma's childhood she never told him and this causes tension. Wanting to clear her name, Emma starts asking questions about what happened all those years ago.

I wasn't crazy about this story. I didn't care for the writing style and found it draggy and boring but I kept reading because I was curious to know who killed the parents. The "whodunnit", though, which we find out at the end, was ridiculous and I wasn't buying it. The book jumps back and forth in time, which I had no issue with, from today to around the time the parents are murdered. It is written in third person perspective from Juliette's, Emma's and Daphne's points of view. I didn't find any of the characters likeable and Nathan's character didn't really add any value. As a head's up, there is swearing.