A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie.

But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t as much of an outsider at Granby as she’d thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.

In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.

Review: I Have Some Questions For You

A podcaster plunges into her past to re-examine who may have killed her roommate in this provocative ‘whodunit.’

Bodie Kane—film professor and podcaster—returns to Granby (the elite New Hampshire boarding school she once attended) to teach a 2-week course on podcasting. One of her students decides to delve into the murder of Thalia Keith—Bodie’s once roommate who was killed the spring of their 1995 senior year and found in the school’s swimming pool.

Omar Evans, the school’s Black athletic trainer, was convicted for (White) Thalia’s death, but in the years since his imprisonment, internet fervor begot questions whether investigators really got it right.

“It was the one where she was young enough and white enough and pretty enough and rich enough that people paid attention.”

Bodie confronts her troubled testimony from back then, as well as those of her classmates—perspectives shaped by racism, personal preconceptions, and marred narratives which contributed to Omar’s conviction. Investigators missed talking to key players including a predatory music teacher who may have been the murderer.

As the title suggests, the novel partly addresses him, as well as us, the “you” construct serving to deepen the intimacy of the narrative and call out our own voyeuristic obsession with true crime.

Makkai approaches the novel ambitiously, probing into femicide and taking on a plethora of powder-keg topics ranging from fetishizing and cancel culture, to class and gender implications, to misogyny and #MeToo. But perhaps especially central to the story’s construct is how she explores the insidiousness of prejudice, the fallibility of remembrance, and our ill-founded agency to uncover and know what really happened in murders like that of Thalia Keith.

Echoes from the 2014 Serial podcast on Adnan Syed reverberate throughout this sharply penned story that’s part literary fiction, part unputdownable ‘whodunit.’ This is my first Makkai novel and I loved it so much I plan to immediately read her other novels.