Starred review from September 12, 2022
Bublitz’s powerful, heartrending debut follows two jilted women who move to Manhattan. Alice Lee leaves small-town Wisconsin on her 18th birthday after her former teacher ends their affair. Ruby Jones, 36, departs Melbourne, Australia, when she realizes the coworker she’s been sleeping with still intends to marry his fiancée. Though Alice and Ruby arrive in New York almost simultaneously and rent places mere streets from each other, their paths don’t cross until a month later, when someone rapes and murders Alice in Riverside Park, and Ruby finds the corpse. Alice had no wallet and nobody reports her missing, so she becomes a Jane Doe. Her spirit lingers, however, nudging Ruby to investigate the true identity of “Riverside Jane” while living her own life more fully. Alice narrates from beyond the grave, intercutting her and Ruby’s stories to maximize tension, resonance, and drive. Using keenly rendered characters and poignant prose, Bublitz crafts a richly textured, deeply feminist murder mystery that spotlights the victim rather than her killer. Readers will eagerly await Bublitz’s next. Agent: Rebecca Wearmouth, Peters, Fraser, & Dunlop (U.K.).
September 15, 2022
A murder victim guides a young woman to a new understanding of her life--and to a killer. The murder of an attractive young woman is the foundation on which many crime novels are built--a device used too often, some might argue. But in her unique first book, Australian writer Bublitz turns that traditional construct on its head with fierce compassion and a welcome dose of feminist outrage. The narrator is 18-year-old Alice Lee, whose troubled past in a small Wisconsin town sent her fleeing to New York City, where she becomes the victim of a terrible crime. But instead of focusing only on the hunt for her killer, Bublitz puts Alice center stage. Her spirit filled with sorrow and fury, Alice demands the reader's attention, assuring us that this is not a story about the man who killed her but about her--and young women everywhere whose lives have been cruelly reduced to sensational headlines. Before her death, Alice fell in love with the city and discovered a fascination with photography. After her murder, she attaches herself to Australian Ruby, another struggling soul who has also left home for a fresh start only to be derailed by finding Alice's body. Alice slowly reveals fragments of herself to Ruby, and together they stumble toward bringing the killer to justice and Ruby toward a new understanding of freedom and the need for boundaries, the importance of finding a community to be a part of, and what she needs to do to make her life her own. This is undeniably a crime story, but Bublitz's creativity, affectionate descriptions of a New York City she obviously adores, and strong character development make this novel stand out in a crowded genre. A unique, feminist take on the suspense genre and our fascination with violence.
COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
March 16, 2021
We know the phrase from books, from crime shows, from the news: ‘The body was found by a jogger.’ Someone is murdered and somebody else finds them, while just going about their day. That’s the end of their story—but not in this debut novel. Ruby Jones, escaping a complicated relationship in Australia, is the one who finds the body of Alice Lee in New York’s Riverside Park, and the discovery does not let her go. Nobody knows—yet—that Alice was escaping her own complications, and that she is watching Ruby’s quest to find out more about her. When Ruby meets kind-yet-chaotic embalmer Lennie Lau and joins her Death Club—a haven for people who have brushed up against death—it lights a new path for both Ruby and Alice. Before You Knew My Name is not an action thriller, but no moment is wasted. It’s beautifully written and soft but doesn’t shy away from blood and savagery, the great tearing loss of grief or the way women live in order to avoid exactly what happened to Alice. Yet Jacqueline Bublitz turns a story of murder into one of hope, in which kindness is a stronger currency than police work and the dead do not really leave us. Alice is a gentle guide for both the reader and for Ruby, though flinches whenever she presses too hard at the memories of her death and its reverberations. This is a lyrical story for those looking for the atmosphere of The Lovely Bones and the gratifying slow burn of Aoife Clifford or Anna George.
Fiona Hardy is a children’s author and a bookseller at Readings Carlton.