Synopsis:
Before You Knew My Name is not just another novel about a dead girl. Rathdr, two women — one alive, one dead — are brought together in the dark underbelly of New York City to solve a tragic murder.
When she arrived in New York on her 18th birthday, carrying nothing but $600 cash and a stolen camera, Alice Lee was looking for a fresh start. Just one month later, she is the city’s latest Jane Doe — an unidentified murder victim.
Ruby Jones is also trying to start over. She travelled halfway around the world only to find herself lonelier than ever until she finds Alice’s body by the Hudson River.
From this first, devastating encounter, the two women form an unbreakable bond.
Alice is sure that Ruby is the key to solving the mystery of her life – and death. And Ruby, struggling to forget what she saw that morning, finds herself obsessed with and unable to let Alice go until she is given the ending she deserves.
Before You Knew My Name doesn’t ask whodunnit. It asks: Who was she? And what did she leave behind? The answers might surprise you.
Review:
Author Jacqueline “Rock” Bublitz grew up on the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island, the youngest of five children but, in many ways, an only child because of the significant age gap between her and her older siblings. She spent a lot of time entertaining herself, including by writing stories. She left New Zealand as a young woman and worked as an account manager for a media company, but returned in 2019. She describes herself as a writer, feminist, and arachnophobe, and wrote Before You Knew My Name, her debut novel, after spending a summer in New York City where she “hung around morgues and the dark corners of city parks (and the human psyche) far too often.” Her manuscript was rejected many times during a more than five-year journey to publication, but the book is now receiving stellar reviews and numerous awards.
Bublitz says she drafted the ending of the book first, and continued penning the narrative in reverse chronological order, which made sense because on the first page she reveals that ” our narrator has not survived.” She crafted the book’s propulsive opening later — it came to her “really strongly” when she had become “intimately acquainted with Alice Lee, one of our two storytellers in the book, so intimately connected to her voice.” She kept hearing, “If I tell you my story . . . and it wouldn’t leave me alone,” so she sat down and wrote the opening in just two or three minutes.
The second narrator is Ruby Jones, who arrives in New York Cit from Melbourne on the same day as Alice arrives from the Midwest. Ruby is twice Alice’s age — 36. “She knows what she’s getting away from but she doesn’t know what she’s going to.” She chose New York from an “if I can make it there” unrealistic, from Bublitz’s perspective, outlook. She’s “a bit of a romantic and a hot mess as well.” She’s escaping a toxic romantic relationship — her lover is engaged to marry another woman but continues his dalliance with her as she hopes against hope that he will finally choose her. Bublitz says “she’s absolutely aimless and she knows it,” and while jogging early one morning in New York, she discovers Alice’s body.
Bublitz was inspired by an actual case in Melbourne. A young woman was chased into the Tenant Gardens around 5:00 a.m. and murdered in an area that was considered safe. “I could identify with this young woman,” Bublitz says. Her body was discovered by a jogger. A jogger herself, Bublitz could not stop wondering, “What if that had been me? I could not get that trauma out of that mind.” She researched the impact upon people who happen upon bodies under similar circumstances, but she could only locate one archived article discussing how a gentleman was so effected by the experience that he returned to the scene every year to commemorate the victim’s death. That’s when Bublitz knew she was “on to something” because no one had ever told the story of the connection between the person who found the body and the victim. She felt she could craft the “very human” tale.
If I tell you my story. If I let you know what happened to me. Maybe you’ll see who I was. Who I am. Maybe you’ll like the truth of me better, and maybe you’ll wish this for every dead girl from now on. The chance to speak for herself, to be known for more than her ending. ~~ Alice
She tells the story beautifully. From the very first page, when Alice begins relating her experiences, Bublitz endears readers to the dead girl who came to New York in search of a fresh start after enduring poverty, the death of her mother, being foisted on various relatives, and, eventually, an inappropriate relationship with one of her teachers. When he realizes how reckless and potentially destructive his behavior has been, Alice flees. She boards a bus from Milwaukee to New York City, taking with her a small amount of cash and his cherished antique camera. It is a Leica from the 1930s that belonged to his mother and she steals it from him because she knows losing it will cause him pain. “I am a survivor. I will turn eighteen years old tomorrow, and I am leaving on my own terms. Nothing – no one – can hold me back now,” she declares.
Alice finds a room for rent in the home of an older man named Noah. She has no job and her money won’t last long, but she works out an arrangement with Noah, who is clearly lonely. Is he a kind-hearted person who feels genuine fondness for Alice and wants to help and protect her by providing her a safe place to stay? Or is he a predator? Alice enjoys living in his beautiful apartment and working for him in exchange for room and board. Their arrangement ensures she can remain there. She walks and walks, learning her way around the city and snapping photographs, and begins to believe that perhaps dreams can come true. But her life ends abruptly and violently. Senselessly. Alice explains that a man murdered her in the park by the river. Is Noah her killer? Readers will find themselves hoping Noah is the kind-hearted man he initially appears to be, and not a cold-blooded murderer.
Simultaneously, Ruby, who is “approximately three years past pretty,” drinks heavily when she first arrives in New York. She stays in the dreary little room she has rented, staring at the ceiling, considering the choices she has made and her feelings for Ash, the man she loves more than she respects herself. She knew he was planning to marry another woman when she got involved with him, but believed that over time he would change his mind. He didn’t. So she escaped to New York for a sabbatical. After she wallows for a week, she finally decides to get up and moving, her anger inspiring her to go for a jog even though it is raining. She feels better, realizing “there is a whole world outside” the brick walls of the apartment building, and “she’s finally ready to crash her way through.”
But as Ruby approaches the marina, she steps on a plastic object – it is round and black, and now shattered. She notices something on the rocks, and quickly realizes she is looking at fingernails and blond hair. Comprehending that she has happened upon the body of a young woman, she summons help. Indeed, she has found Alice’s mangled body. “Ruby Jones is my only witness,” Alice explains. From the waterfront path, Ruby can’t get to Alice, but Alice is able to “make my way to her” but is dismayed to find that Ruby “can only see the husk of me, left down on the rocks.” But her spirit has aligned with and will remain with Ruby as the police search for Alice’s killer and a traumatized Ruby tries to understand the ways in which her life is forever changed that morning.
Before You Knew My Name is a unique and inventive tale, related from the perspective of a young woman whose life ends tragically and wants justice because she has been robbed of the future she was just beginning to envision and create for herself. “I really fought hard to stay in my body. I tried my best, but I just couldn’t hold on. I did not want to die.” At first, the police are unable to identify Alice because she had no wallet or form of identification with her, so she becomes yet another “Jane Doe” whose plight will fade from the headlines quickly. The media dubs her “Riverside Jane” but she wants to be identified so that she can be remembered and mourned by her best friend back at home, and her killer can be prevented from murdering again, even though she acknowledges that when the man who murdered her is identified, “he’ll be the one they want to now, the one who takes over the narrative.” When no one comes to the morgue to claim her body, she fears no one will care about her because she will be classified as “the wrong kind of victim.” Meaning, the kind who remain invisible. Alice looks to Ruby to ensure that she is not forgotten, whispering to Ruby, “I’m Alice,” again and again. But Ruby cannot hear her over the din of the city noises.
Ruby recognizes that she can never go back to being the woman she was before that morning. The media reports that Alice’s body was discovered by a jogger, but “why did they never say what happened to the jogger after that?” She wants to help. She wonders why only some victims’ stories are deemed worthy of being told. She can’t stop thinking about Alice; she feels connected to her. She seeks out other “finders of the dead” and discovers a small group who call themselves the Death Club. Led by a mortician, the members include Josh, who survived a near-death experience and suffers from survivor’s guilt, and a grieving mother. They are an eclectic and fascinating group of supporting characters who reveal their own tragic stories and the personal demons they are striving to overcome. Their ponderings about death are absorbing.
Fortunately, the detective assigned to Alice’s case is seasoned, and determined to solve it. As Alice remains beside Ruby, Bublitz takes readers on their journey of discovery. It is poignant, frequently heartbreaking, and powerful as a result of the achingly simple yet captivating way in which Bublitz describes Ruby’s encounters with the members of the Death Club, the relationships she forms with them, and the myriad ways in which she grows and matures, unwilling to be aimless any longer. At the center of the story is a cleverly-imagined mystery and the believable procedural tale about how Detective O’Bryne follows sometimes obscure clues that would be missed by a less diligent investigator.
But the real power of Before You Know My Name is the way in which Bublitz examines female empowerment from the perspectives of her two female protagonists. As noted, for Alice, it is about being valued. Even though her life was short, she wants to ensure that it was not without merit and meaning, and that she will be remembered as a person who mattered. The same things are important to Ruby, but from the perspective of her continuing life. Bublitz makes a strong statement about the importance of safety to women in New York City, in particular, but wherever they find themselves, and the vast power imbalance that still leaves women vulnerable and too often victimized.
Bublitz explores, from a decidedly feminist and fresh vantage point, the often surprising and frequently profound ways in which people’s lives intersect and become intertwined, and how those connections impact not just emotions, but decision-making, and shape the future. She also offers a sly indictment of the ways in which the media sensationalize crime, especially crimes against women. And the shamefully fleeting and superficial attention paid to cases that lack “legs,” meaning the ones the public grows tired of hearing about because they are not flashy or titillating enough to sustain interest from an industry focused on soundbites rather than substance. Bublitz makes clear that Alice’s killer should never overtake the narrative or overshadow the significance of the life he stole from her. Bublitz also challenges readers to consider their beliefs about the afterlife. Could those nudges and urgings we all feel emanate from spirits of the dead who remain with us and, as Alice struggles to communicate with Ruby, whisper to us?
Before You Knew My Name is a richly emotional, riveting, and thought-provoking debut from a talented and promising new thriller writer. It is a hauntingly tragic, yet life-affirming story of two women readers will not soon forget. And it is one of the best books of 2022.
Excerpt from Before You Knew My Name
ONE
The first thing I understand about the city I will die in: it beats like a heart. My feet have barely hit the pavement, the bus that delivered me here has only just hissed away from the curb, when I feel the pulse of New York, the hammering. There are people everywhere, rushing to its rhythm, and I stand open-mouthed in the middle of the widest street I’ve ever seen, smelling, tasting the real world for the very first time. Though I am named for a girl who fell down a rabbit hole, I feel in this moment as if I have climbed up out of the darkness and left the distortion of my old life behind me. If you were to look back, you’d see all the four-way stop signs and the star-spangled flags of small-town America waving us goodbye. You’d catch a glimpse of untended roads littered with potholes, and windowless convenience stores set down on otherwise empty lots. You’d see rusted ice freezers next to sliding-glass doors, and nine-dollar bottles of liquor on dusty shelves. If you looked hard enough, you might even find my name traced in that filmy coating, there between the expired packets of potato chips and the fading jars of salsa.
Alice Lee.
I am here. She was there. And then she ran away to New York City, leaving all that dust behind her.
The second thing I understand: I cannot fall back down that rabbit hole. Not even if Mr. Jackson shows up at the bottom, his delicate fingers beckoning. I need to prove I can make it on my own, that I can survive just fine without him. I will not be like my mother, who forgave any man who said sorry. I have learned her own failed lesson, see. That when a man discovers where to hurt you, the way he touches you changes. He won’t be able to stop himself from pressing hard against that spot, no matter how many times it makes you cry.
I will never let a man make me cry. Not ever again.
Unzipping my duffel bag, I swing it to the front of my hip bone. Reaching inside, I run my fingers over the black vulcanite of the old Leica buried at the bottom of the canvas, feel for the grooves of the detachable lens as I walk. I don’t know why I need this proof, when I have been feeling the weight of the camera, the bump and knock against my thigh, the whole journey here. It is not as if it could have suddenly disappeared from deep inside my bag, cocooned by my sweaters and socks and underwear. But I need to reassure myself the Leica is safe and intact, all the same. Because this is what I have left. This is what I brought with me, and it is a small triumph to know that Mr. Jackson will soon realize what I have taken from him. If he does not miss me, he will at least miss how he used to look at me through that lens.
Everyone’s lost something, Alice.
Isn’t that what he told me, just the other day?
For three glorious weeks in the late summer of 1995, my mother appeared on a billboard in Times Square. In the months before I was born, if you were to stand out front of the old Roy Rogers restaurant, you could look across the street and see her beautiful face decorating the side of a tall, wide building, right there between ads for the Donahue talk show and a movie called Showgirls, coming soon. I know these details from my mother’s stories of that summer. How she ran away to New York after one too many beatings from her father, as if there was a magical number for the endurance of such things, and he finally exceeded it in her eighteenth year. And how, her lip still bleeding, she stole money from my grandfather’s wallet to buy a bus ticket from Bayfield County, Wisconsin, to New York City, the most faraway place she could think of. Her first night in the city, trying not to fall asleep in a back booth of some dingy Eighth Avenue diner, she met a semi-famous photographer. Before the night was over, he had shifted her into his apartment, cleaned her up, and when she looked nice and pretty, said he was in love with her. He wasn’t, of course, or he was for a time, but he loved his rich wife in the Hamptons more than he loved my mother, so he eventually left her. She was already pregnant when he snapped the picture of her smiling face that would end up reigning over Times Square those three sultry weeks.
“You were there with me, Alice Lee,” she would remind me. “Everyone looking up at us, as if we belonged there.”
I never knew if my mother told my father what he was really seeing when he took that picture. If he ever knew his unborn child was also there in the frame. The finer details of how I came to be were smudged, blurred out, by the time the story made its way to me.
These are the things I think of. The two of us on a billboard, high above Times Square. My presence unnoticed back then, just as it is tonight, as I wander past streets lined with busy restaurants and glittering signs, a crossword puzzle of names running down the sides of the fanciest buildings I’ve ever seen. Who do you have to be, what do you have to do, to get your name up there?
Just a few weeks from now, when people can’t stop talking about me, this city will give me a whole new name. My real name will be a question no one can answer, so they will call me Jane Doe. A dead girl who—
But we are only at the beginning of things tonight. My name is Alice Lee, and I have just stepped off an overheated cross-country bus, only just started to make my way up an avenue called Seventh in the city of New York. I am alert, alive, present, as I breathe in the peculiar smell of cardboard and piss and metal that is my first hour in this city. There is an order to how things happen, a trail of breadcrumbs I need you to follow. Right now, I want you to get lost with me, as I turn the map on my secondhand phone this way and that, following the blue dot that is me, right here, pulsing. In this moment, the lines and circles make no sense to me at all.
Here we are, on an island. Surrounded by water, and somehow this makes it easier to breathe. Delivered to a busy bus terminal with two bags and six hundred dollars in cash, and an unfamiliar address stored in my phone. I am eighteen, just turned, and there are a million things I cannot do, but I can do this. You can’t exactly call it running away. Though to be sure, like my mother, I waited to collect that extra year. Years are funny like that. The way a certain accumulation gives you permission for all kinds of things. Eighteen years old, and you are suddenly able to consent. Does that happen at midnight, or one minute past the hour, or is there some other calculation that makes you ready? Able to consent. Does that mean I did not consent before? It certainly seems that way to Mr. Jackson.
Fingers traveling all over metal and lens. I cannot think of him without touching what used to belong to him.
I used to belong to him.
Now I belong only to myself. I am no longer a minor, a ward of the state. With the addition of just one day, there is no more threat over my head, no more list of strangers with the power to control my life. I’m eighteen years old and suddenly nobody can touch me. I’m so light with this realization that, were it not for the weight of my bags, I might actually skip. Manhattan’s wide, heaving streets seem made for skipping this first, beautiful night, as horns honk and engines hiss, and passersby talk too loud on their cell phones.
I shimmy around these noises, careful to avoid all the concrete cracks, and the large, metal-framed holes that seem to puncture the sidewalk at increasing intervals. Cellar doors, I realize, but only after I see some of those rusty traps open up, men in aprons climbing onto the street from hidden staircases, crates of flowers, bags of fruit in their arms. I have no idea where they bring these gifts from. What gardens have they been tending to underneath my feet? Perhaps there is a whole other city living, thriving, beneath me. The thought makes me speed up, shift my body closer to the curb, away from those holes and these men. I have only just hoisted myself up into this new world; I do not want anything or anyone to pull me back down.
As I travel farther north, I move my head left to right, up and down, acknowledging every unfamiliar thing, greeting each green and white street sign, each gift store Lady Liberty statue, some as big as a child. Halal and kosher signs blink their welcome, and the cross-signal man clicks at me. It’s my heartbeat that’s as loud as the city now, taking it all in, and I have the sudden impulse to click my own fingers, hail a cab like they do in the movies. But the traffic is moving south on this street, cars weaving left and right as they pass me, claiming and conceding inches from one another at best, and no one looks to be getting anywhere faster than me.
Feet aching, muscles stiff from the long bus ride, I consider calling Noah, asking him for the shortest route to his apartment. But we haven’t spoken to each other yet. Not really. Text messages hastily sent and quickly answered don’t count, and I don’t even know his last name. Thinking about it, I should probably be a little wary. A man opening up his home to a stranger like this. Room available, the ad said. Own bed, shared bathroom. As if it might be normal to share the bed, too. $300 P/W — all included. I don’t know what all included means. I hope it means breakfasts, or a cup of coffee at least. I’ve booked the room for one week to start, and that’ll be half of the money in my pocket gone. I don’t let myself think about what might happen after those seven days are up, except to remind myself that a week is long enough to find another way. If something is wrong with this Noah surname-unknown guy, I’ll simply find that other way, and fast.
It’s not like I haven’t had to do this kind of thing before. Only this time, if I have to start over, I’ll be starting over in New York City.
Despite my sore feet, I feel a slow fizz of excitement, as if this city is carbonating my blood. I have come back to the place I was conceived. All those years of moving around the Midwest, of not knowing the kids in my class, or the name of my mother’s latest boyfriend, or where she was when she didn’t come home at night—they were merely lessons, preparation. For this. For standing on my own two feet, unnoticed, in the best possible way. Within twenty-four hours of arriving here all those years ago, my mother had come to rely on the sympathies of strangers. I won’t do that with this Noah whoever, even if he turns out to be the nicest person in New York. I won’t do that with anyone here. I have earned my independence, and I won’t squander my future on something so hard-won. I have 79.1 years promised to me, that’s the life expectancy they gave to girls born in 1996, like me. 79.1 years — I learned that in second or third grade, in some school, in some town I can’t quite remember, but I’ve never forgotten the number, or how it felt to count out the years I had already used up, subtract them from the life span of a girl, and see what I had left. Here, tonight, on my eighteenth birthday, I have more than sixty years ahead of me. I’m going to make a whole world of those years, starting now.
Later, when we get to that next part, it won’t take long for a man with fingers at my neck to prove me wrong. He will mock my sincerity, laugh at the idea of a girl like me making her own world. He will be so sure of his own right to my body, he will leave nothing but the memory of that girl behind.
We will keep coming back to this part. No matter how hard I try, the streets and sounds of Manhattan will fade, the men with their fruits and their flowers will disappear, and we will end up down there on the rocks. It’s inevitable, no matter how much I try to distract you. Because this hopeful, heaving night is just one part of my story. The other story is this: there is the body of a dead girl waiting, down on the banks of the Hudson River.
The man who did this has left her there, gone home. And soon there will be a lonely woman who looks down, across, at the dead girl. I can see this lonely woman coming, or see her already there, and she’s sadder than I have ever been, because her sorrow is still simmering. It hasn’t boiled over and scalded her life, which makes her feel that nothing important, nothing meaningful, has ever happened to her.
I am about to happen to her.
Comments are closed.