“She needed to get home, where it was… safe. Where there were no bad men, and where Mommy and Daddy could hug her and her doll.”


I read and really enjoyed Mike Omer’s Abby Mullen series. Please Tell Me is a stand alone novel with quite a different vibe than the Mullen series.

This book is intense and had a nice twist, but it’s a bit darker and it won’t be for all readers.

There are several things in this book that may be turn-offs or triggers for some people so I’ll list them up front: child abduction, a narcissistic parental relationship, quite a few Covid references, and some graphic and violent deaths- we don’t get the play-by-play as they happen but we are told how the people died after the fact and we know that the killer was inspired by several horror films.

Just one of these could be enough for someone not to read a book, so Omer took a risk in combining all of these things into one book. For some, it may be too much.

I wouldn’t be able to read books like these one right after the other and if all his future books continue in this trend I would need to stop, but for a one-off, I could handle it. It helped that there wasn’t a ton of swearing and the violence was not glorified or overdone like a horror novel. There were creepy parts and uncomfortable parts and danger lurking around the corners, but we weren’t subjected to blood everywhere and we weren’t forced into the killer’s mind as he committed his acts.



I wasn’t sure how I was going to like the book when it opens from the POV of a little girl walking along a road without shoes. She had been abducted and she had somehow escaped. It breaks your heart to read her thoughts. That beginning chapter is the only chapter where we are in the little girl’s thoughts.

I was glad that the book didn’t portray her within her captivity because it’s so hard to read about kids going through trauma. Instead, the book is about trying to figure out who took her. She (Kathy) goes to process her experience with a child therapist, Robin— our main character.

Kathy has been so traumatized that she doesn’t speak. If she could have just been able to speak or write (like the title- please tell me), this whole thing would have gone a lot differently, but that’s not how trauma works. There are no neat packages with little bows.

And so, we are drawn through her therapy process through play. Kathy starts to reenact what appears to be violent scenes using little figurines and a dollhouse during her sessions. Robin realizes what she is doing and she tries to help law enforcement by providing details of these sessions that start to match up with murders that have occurred since Kathy was rescued.

Can they help find her abductor before the abductor comes back for Kathy?



Comments

I was mostly satisfied with the direction Omer took everything, but I feel like we needed a little bit more background on what led her abductor to do what they did. It wasn’t clear what was behind that and so the twist feels a bit like a twist just for the sake of a twist instead of a logical progression. It definitely made for a surprise— which I liked— but after we found out, I would have liked more information on motive.

There develops a small romance between Robin and one of the investigators on the cases. I didn’t care for that. It added a bit to the character development of Robin, but not much to the story as a whole. I don’t really like the trope of ‘woman in distress falls for law enforcement person helping her.’ Overdone, not realistic, unnecessary.


I think Robin was a likable character. Some reviewers have mentioned the therapy sessions being boring or repetitive, but I didn’t feel like that when I was reading. I thought it was interesting to see how a therapist would handle these situations. Based on the acknowledgements at the end of the book, it sounds like Omer got a lot of input from professionals so I think what he wrote is a pretty realistic handling. And I appreciated that Omer included that Robin consulted another therapist while treating Kathy to make sure she wasn’t doing anything harmful. She didn’t have an ego and it added to the authenticity of her practice.

There are parts of her character that make her more complex— her relationship with her mother, her divorce, her miscarriage, and her own need for therapy. I think we view people like therapists on these pedestals like they don’t have anything traumatic or dysfunctional in their own lives because they have all this psychological knowledge and know what’s going on. But it makes sense that they should have their own struggles and might need to see their own therapist. I don’t think that makes them a bad therapist, it makes them a normal person.

I think Omer did a great job with some of Robin’s inner dialogue— like when she is doom scrolling on Facebook one night. Omer is very attuned to social media behavior and psychology and I found that section relatable and humorous. Like how she made sure to ‘like’ all the posts about Kathy’s return because she didn’t want to make her own post about it because ‘It always confused her when people stampeded their way to social media to share their feelings.’ but she also didn’t want people to think she didn’t like that Kathy was back. (Side note: Robin has more Facebook friends than me.)

I do wish Robin wasn’t a smoker. It seems like such a stupid habit for anyone to take up now that we KNOW all the harmful effects of smoking. Why would anyone do that?! So it’s hard for me not to see smokers as dumb people. I wish her coping mechanism was something else. Like candy. I don’t know.



One thing I thought was strange as I was reading it was that it felt like Omer only used the word ‘cop’ instead of police officer. Cop just feels like a negative way of referring to officers. If I was talking to my kids I don’t think I would use the term cop. But in the story Robin used ‘cop’ with Kathy.

I did double check this and my perception was a little off from reality. Cop was used 65 times— which is a lot, but then I checked for police and that was like 73. So he did interchange, but my perception while reading was that ‘cop’ was overused.

I know cop is just more informal, but it just feels disrespectful to me. Cop feels like the term perpetrators use. Police feels like the term victims and normal people use. Is that just me?



The Triggers

As mentioned, there are several trigger points or turn-offs.

Child abduction. As a mom, I’ve obviously worried about this scenario multiple times. I think Omer does a good job of portraying Kathy’s mom’s (Claire) struggle with what happened. Kathy was taken from her yard while she was playing and her mom was doing dishes. Claire endures judgment from people about not paying attention to her daughter, and the guilty ‘if onlys’ that plague her. And then once Kathy is back, Claire has to learn how to care for Kathy all over again because of her silence and her reactions to loud noises etc.

Narcissistic parent. Robin’s mom is a classic narcissist. I know of several people who have one of these in their life and the way Omer writes their interactions and dialogue seems very on par with reality. It is a frustrating thing to read and I can see how some who already deal with that in real life would not want that in a book they’re reading.

Covid. I’m not a fan of Covid being included in books. I’ve read a few now where authors have set their stories during or in a world where Covid existed. The way it’s talked about in the book is very pragmatic and normal conversations or comments about people’s lives: when they couldn’t leave their houses, when they had to wear masks, how people were fighting over toilet paper, how people cared if you were vaccinated or not, etc. There was also one reference to a shooter drill in school. It’s not everywhere in the book but it’s more than a few comments. I do think it’s an interesting point within the setting of the book. When Kathy first disappeared and they had the community help search, everyone had masks which obscured the police from really seeing who came out to help (since the abductor often shows up to those kinds of things).

Violent deaths. I won’t go into details here because I’ve already mentioned a few things, but the deaths are based on horror movie scenes and each one was different. I don’t feel like it was written like a horror novel at all which is good. It adds a darkness to the book, but it’s not super descriptive and doesn’t take up a lot of page real estate. Another element of this was that there is mention of these crimes and violence being an erotic experience for the perpetrator.



Recommendation

This is a hard book to know how to recommend. I think people who really don’t have any triggers and they just want an intense thriller will really like this book.

But I just think it’s important for the reader to consider if this combination of things will be okay for them to read.

If it was really graphic and dark I don’t think I would recommend it at all, but I don’t feel like that was the case here. It wasn’t over-the-top, it just had a unique combination of things that could be overwhelming to certain readers.

I would still definitely recommend Omer’s other books (they’re more crime/procedural thrillers with law enforcement being the primary characters) and I’ll keep reading his future books at this point!


[Content Advisory: 1 f-word, 31 s-words; no sexual content; violence and some graphic deaths described after the fact]

**Received an ARC via NetGalley**