Customer Reviews

We Know

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Nick Horrigan was 18 when something happened that changed the course of his life forever. He was forced onto the run, and it is only now, many years later, that he is starting to find some peace of mind. Then abruptly one night a SWAT team descends on his apartment and it's clear that he is unable to escape the events that have shaped his life. As everyone from the President of the US down seems to have a vested interest in him, it becomes increasingly difficult for him to know who he can trust.

The book kicks off with a hiss and a roar and the early chapters keep the tension high. However as the plot develops, it all starts to get so far-fetched that I struggled to suspend my belief. There are also some glaring plotholes which severely detracted from the story. For example, the way that Nick was forced onto the run makes little sense, and the fact that he has never told anyone about what happened but suddenly starts confiding in people now when the stakes are higher than they have ever been.

I like the way Hurwitz writes and this is a decent enough holiday thriller, but it pales in comparison to similar writers such as Harlan Coben or Linwood Barclay.

We Know, is a sort of Harlan Coben style storyline where Nick Horrigan, a 17 year old sneaks out of his paranoid about security step father Frank's house to get laid for the first time, and upon return finds his bullet ridden step father in the final seconds of life pointing at the deadbolts trying to get out what sounds like "why" on his dying breath. Since his step father had bent over backwards to make Nick feel comfortable with his dating of his mother, Nick's guilt builds. His mother also finds it hard to look at him now and when Nick notices a car watching the house Nick tries to tell her Nick's paranoia was right and it wasn't a junkie who killed Frank. However those same men he saw in the car phone Nick, they tell him where his mother is seated in a restaurant she went with her friend and he'd better come outside. Nick doesn't want to be responsible for his mother's death as well so walks out the door. The men tell him to leave a message on his mother's voicemail, get on a plane and never come back or they'll frame him for Frank's murder. So he does.

Now ten years or so later Nick has returned to his home city but hasn't contacted his mother. He can relate to the homeless on the streets so has landed a pretty good job in an organisation that helps them. However suffering from the same paranoid habits of his step father all this time one night he notices a black rope fall down upon his balcony. Seconds later a SWAT team enter and drag him with them to a nuclear power plant where they say a terrorist is asking for him. The terrorist tells him he is the only one he trusts, well his step father was and since he was his son he's the next best thing but events stop Nick learning more. The aftermath will force in Nick's mind the decision to find out exactly what happened that night which puts himself and those around him in severe danger.

The problem with this story is you don't really feel any empathy or anything else for Nick or the other characters who aren't too realistic and don't really care if he survives or what was behind what happened on the night Frank died. There's no must turn the page factor that the great writers like Harlan Coben, Linwood Barclay, James Siegel, Charlie Huston, Joseph Finder and others have. Plus you've got the why didn't they just kill him instead of going through an elaborate plan of telling him to relocate when he was 17 when they obviously have no hangup with murder line going through your head the whole time you turn the pages.