Review: "Please Tell Me" by Mike Omer

Please Tell Me by Mike Omer
Published November 2023 via Thomas & Mercer
★★★

A missing girl is found, miraculously, alive—but unable to talk about the months she spent in captivity. And her therapist is gradually more and more disturbed by what the girl is able to communicate through play therapy... There's a delightful level of creepiness to this, and a gradually rising level of tension. I like that it takes a while before we understand the full details of what happened, and—better—there's a gradually built foreshadowing of whodunnit that raises red-herring hackles, and it's not clear until the end whether that's, well, a red herring or a result. I'm also fond of the dollhouse plotline, for various reasons, and I suspect a lot of readers will relate on something of a nostalgic level.

That said...first, Evil Villains Who Are Evil. I've gone on record many times as finding this uninteresting, because I prefer villains who have complexity to their motivations to villains who are just straight-up unhinged. Second, the romance here feels incredibly rote and unnecessary, shoved in because apparently romance is now a required part of murder mysteries. And third...there's a surprising amount of COVID in here for a book that takes place in 2022. Don't get me wrong—in 2022 I was still masking the hell out of my life, self-testing regularly, avoiding crowds, and planning my travel carefully. But I also spent half the year accompanying an immunocompromised relative to hospital appointments, and you'd better believe that I was hyperaware of just how much the rest of the world had moved on from taking precautions. It felt a bit odd to see so many characters here still stressing about it so much, because while I understand, I also find it hard to believe.

Overall a solid enough read, but the COVID plot doesn't bring enough of a twist to make this stand out.