REVIEW: Everyone Knows but You: A Tale of Murder on the Maine Coast by Thomas E. Ricks
An FBI agent finds himself in the insular world of a fishing village on the Maine coast where the rules are different—sometimes lethally so.
After his wife and two children are killed in a car crash, Ryan Tapia starts a new life in Maine. But his first case there is a puzzling oddball—the corpse of a fisherman washes up on federal land, while the man’s boat drifts into waters that are part of an Indian reservation. Ryan quickly learns the nuances of Maine life as he delves into two illicit coastal trades: hard drugs and rare fish. Many of the locals are happy to see that particular fisherman dead. What’s more, they are not shy about noting that Ryan must have screwed up pretty badly to be posted to such a remote location as Bangor, Maine.
Undaunted, Ryan works to understand the unforgiving way of life on Liberty Island, where people live by an older, harsher code. Adrift on a sailboat one day, he encounters a man from the Malpense tribe, living as a hermit on a remote island, who witnessed something that fateful day.
CW/TW – The hero’s family died in a car accident and he often dreams about how he imagines it happened. Incest/rape is briefly described on page. Use of drugs is mentioned a lot.
Dear Mr. Ricks,
When I read this blurb, I kind of liked the idea that everyone hates the guy who was killed. There would be lots of suspects and motives I thought. Plus I wanted to learn more about Maine never having had the pleasure of visiting it. Let me be frank. This one took a long time to get going and even after that it was dogged by info dumps and more telling than showing. But I did learn about Maine and I stuck it out to see who actually dunnit.
Ryan Tapia is getting tired of everyone he meets in Maine immediately asking what he screwed up in order to have been stationed there. He actually chose the location to be as far as possible from where his life was destroyed when his family died in a car accident. He’s not sure he’ll like Maine but it’s different.
His first case is a lobsterman found floating in the water. It appears that someone made the effort to make it look like an accidental death but the two bashes to Ricky Cutts’ head give it away. Turns out Cutts was generally disliked by everyone he knew and the feeling among the residents of the island where he was born and raised (and his ancestors were born and raised since post Revolutionary days) is “good riddance.”
Several islanders freely tell Ryan about Cutts, about themselves, about how things are done on the island, and how they’ve always been done. Ryan is more than sure that he’s being led around and that a good number of people know the truth. But will he ever figure it out?
I read the part of the description about the book that says “New York Times bestselling author” and completely skipped over that this is a debut crime book. Now looking at the other books, I notice that most appear to be nonfiction with topics that would seem to invite a lot of background information being needed and supplied. In the early stages of this book, there is a shit ton of telling as Ryan scopes out his new assignment location; we learn about his rental cabin, the island where Cutts lived, the boats in the harbor, the battered women’s shelter, and the highliners – a combo social and work group of Maine lobster/fishermen – tell Ryan all kinds of stuff including how they figured out that he was in their usual “watering hole” where they have Thursday breakfast. I can understand why Ryan would mentally note his surroundings as he’s a newbie as well as a lawman but the rest is a lot of telling rather than showing. And this telling never stops.
Ryan listens, takes notes, calls people, walks around the area, talks to more people and very often point blank asks them, “What am I missing here?” And they tell him. Over and over he gets filled in on Maine, this area, making a life from the sea, who he ought to talk to, that he needs to stay clear of tribal land, and the traditional view of what an upstanding member of the community does. Frustrated people finally resort to basically spelling out how he should be viewing this crime and the murder victim. One man almost pityingly says, “We kind of expected better of the FBI.” I did, too.
But I enjoyed learning more about this coastal area of Maine and the Mainers who wrest a living from the sea. Yes, it’s also told rather than truly shown but I learned a lot. Mainly that visiting in the summer is the right idea and that I’d probably not have the stamina to last a winter there.
Ryan does finally(!) figure it out and he gets to use his powers of deduction to prove who the murderer is. I’m still not sure why certain people were so forthcoming as they could have shut down this investigation the way they did one not too much earlier. There’s an out-of-the-blue sex hookup that comes from basically nowhere and that I didn’t buy as anything romantic. But then maybe it wasn’t meant to be. Justice is done but I agree with the islanders that Cutts deserved what he got. C
~Jayne
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