Book Review: You Can't Catch Me

Synopsis:

When the game is deception, nothing is as it seems.

Do you want to play a game?

Twelve years ago, Jessica Williams escaped the cult in which she grew up. Thanks to Liam, the private detective who rescued her, she reintegrated into society, graduated from college, and launched a career as a journalist.

But recently, it all came crashing down and she has endured uncomfortable notoriety. Trying to put it all behind her, she decided to take a vacation in Puerto Vallarta. At the airport bar, Jessica meets a woman with her identical name and birth date, and they chat about all the things they have in common. It appears to be nothing more than an odd coincidence . . . until a week later, when Jessica finds her bank account has been drained using her personal information.

Following a trail of the grifter’s victims, each with the same name, Jessica enlists players for her own game. She devises a plan by which they’ll set a trap, wait for the impostor to strike again, and catch her.

But plans can go awry, the delicate bonds of trust can fray. As Jessica tries to escape the shadows of her childhood, she discovers the risks are greater than she imagined.

Confronting the casualties of her past, Jessica can’t help but wonder . . . who will pay the price?

Review:

Author Catherine McKenzie is a native of Montreal, Canada, and a graduate of McGill University where she studied history and law. She has continued practicing law while writing ten bestselling novels in the early mornings and on weekends, including Spin, Arranged, Forgotten, Hidden, Smoke, Fractured, The Good Liar, and I’ll Never Tell.

Her latest novel, You Can’t Catch Me, is dedicated to a friend with whom she has traveled extensively. “Because my friend has a very common name, we kept getting stopped at the U.S. border,” McKenzie explains. “Someone with a similar name and the same birthday was wanted by the police. Over time, we were able to discern that the person the police were after is a man. The border guards even suggested she change her name, even though she did nothing wrong.” McKenzie says “that got my mind working.” At a book signing, she was asked her middle name. It turned out that the woman asking and McKenzie had identical names, spelled exactly the same way. “We even looked somewhat alike,” McKenzie recalls. “It occurred to me that someone could steal a person’s money because they were not stealing someone’s identity. They were the same person on paper. That was the starting point for the book.” McKenzie says that once the idea for the book took shape, her characters came to life.

As the story opens, Jessica Williams has suffered public humiliation and the loss of her career. But she received a severance package so she decided to vacation in Puerto Vallarta — and announced her destination on social media. Awaiting her flight in the airport bar, the server attempts to deliver a drink to “Jessica.” Both Jessica and the woman sitting next to her claim it. They begin chatting and the woman tells Jessica, “I have this thing I do whenever I meet another Jessica Williams,” claiming that because she travels a lot it happens “often enough.” She says, “I call it Jessica Williams Twenty Questions. . . . It’s a way of seeing how similar we are.” Jessica agrees to play and the two women exchange details about their lives, including their birthplaces, where they lived growing up, mother’s maiden names, best friends, and schools attended. As they part company, the woman suggests that they exchange contact information by tapping their phones together. “Jessica Williams has been added to your contacts,” the message on her telephone announces. Jessica continues on to Mexico where she keeps her telephone turned off for a week while she relaxes, reads, and contemplates the next chapter of her life. It isn’t until she returns to her Greenwich Village apartment and turns her telephone back on that she realizes there is a problem. Numerous notifications from her bank advise her that she has withdrawn money and her spending has been much higher than is typical. Except Jessica didn’t make the withdrawals. Her bank confirms that $240,000 was wired out of her account, but can provide no details about the transaction. The bank does, however, obtain surveillance photos of the person who withdrew cash using the ATM. It is immediately evident that Jessica Two, as Jessica has dubbed the woman from the airport, is the culprit. The police offer little hope because the crime is a low priority and it is unlikely that their resources will be devoted to apprehending Jessica Two.

Jessica reaches out to Liam, a charming forty-two-year-old private detective with a side hustle as a fixer for prominent New York families, for help. Jessica grew up in a cult — the Land of Todd — in upstate New York. Liam rescued her when she was a teenager and guided her through the process of reintegrating into society. “One way or another, he’s taught me most of the things I know,” Jessica observes in the first-person narrative McKenzie employs.

McKenzie has “always been fascinated by cults. I have done deep dives into Scientology and watched many documentaries on cults. I even know two people who were brought up in cults. They left when they became adults.” In the Land of Todd, parents abdicated their role, relinquishing their children to be raised communally in accordance with Todd’s teachings and punishments. “A common thread is that cult parents probably start out with good intentions,” McKenzie observes. “They don’t join a group thinking they will turn into puppets. What does happen is that they eventually give over their autonomy to the leader. This leader becomes the parent over the adults and children. Part of what happens is the seduction of the parent. The leader is also usually the abuser.” That’s precisely the story McKenzie devises for Jessica. She harbors anger and resentment toward the parents she feels abandoned her, who remain members of the cult. Jessica observes, “I’ll never truly understand my mother. But she did give me the gift of anger. It has a way of focusing you that forgiveness can’t.” As Jessica neared her eighteenth birthday, she was ordered to build a new cabin in which she was to reside alone. Most of the other girls in the cult lived together once they reached the age of adulthood. Jessica remains convinced that Todd had a particularly abhorrent plan for her, and her parents — especially her mother — were complicit. That was the point at which she took the chance to escape with Liam’s assistance, but she could not convince her best friend, Kiki, to go with her. She has always felt guilty about leaving without her.

Jessica enlists Liam to assist her by ascertaining Jessica Two’s real identity, tracking her down, and demanding that she return Jessica’s money. She devises a clever scheme to find other women named Jessica Williams with the same birthday, reasoning that Jessica Two may have scammed others. If so, she convinces Liam that those other victims will want to partner in her quest to bring Jessica Two to justice. Indeed, they locate other victims and Jessica sets in motion an elaborate plan to lure Jessica Two to the Grand Tetons where they will mete out justice. But Jessica Two is not easily intimidated, and her threatening messages are unnerving, as are the stories Jessica hears from the other women whose lives she has ruined. Still, Jessica notes one of the things Jessica Two “doesn’t know about me yet: I don’t respond well to threats.”

McKenzie’s plot is inventive and engrossing, and Jessica’s narrative moves at a relentless pace. McKenzie’s continued growth as an author is evident as her deftly-constructed cat-and-mouse game proceeds in a credible, entertaining manner. You Can’t Catch Me also features well-developed characters. Jessica still bears the scars of a childhood spent believing that her parents did not love her because they abandoned her to Todd’s whims and failed to fight to keep her safe and secure, even allowing her to endure punishment like being banished to the forest for a week at a time with no food or shelter. She has always had feelings for Liam, who would not act on them when she was a mere eighteen years old to his thirty. But now the twelve-year age difference is no longer insurmountable. Among McKenzie’s intriguing supporting characters are the elusive Liam, the other Jessicas, Jessica’s parents, and the fellow escapees from the cult with whom she maintains friendships. They are a cohesive group with a shared history who provide support and compassion to each other.

McKenzie says she wants to read and strives to craft books that readers “don’t want to put down.” With You Can’t Catch Me, she has succeeded yet again. You Can’t Catch Me is full of shocking plot twists, surprising developments, and revelations, with an ending few readers will see coming. At its core, the story is a compelling exploration of revenge fueled, in part, by erroneous assumptions. And an obsession with retribution designed to avenge a tragedy. McKenzie wisely leaves readers to draw their own conclusions about her characters and their motivations after all is revealed in this smartly-plotted. fast-paced, and highly entertaining mystery.