This Review for The Note by Alafair Burke will have my quick take on this new January 2025 suspense thriller, plus spoilers, a timeline, and the ending explained. This is my first Alafair Burke book. Did I like it and, more importantly, will you? Let’s find out!
The Note by Alafair Burke: Jen’s Quick Take
The Goodreads reviews are very divided on The Note, so let’s break it down:
- The blurb makes it sound like a Vacation Thriller BUT
- It is a really more of a Friend Group Suspense Story with a Pretty Little Liars/I Know What You Did Last Summer vibe
- Readers who disliked it complained about the unlikeable characters. I’ll explain that more below.
- Other complaints revolved around the fact that the pandemic was referenced AND that the book threw a lot of issues in there. Will these be dealbreakers for you? I’ll explain more below before I get to the spoilers!
- If you did like this book, I have recommendation of similar titles!
- To be published on January 7, 2025 by Knopf. 320 pages. Thanks to the publisher for an advance copy for review.
Review of The Note by Alafair Burke
- On the positive side, I think Burke did something that is often hard for writers in the suspense subgenre: she created a LOT of uncertainty and doled out clues, red herrings, and facts at a measured pace. This kept the suspense going.
The three main characters, May, Lauren and Kelsey, met at a summer camp for young artists and musicians (think Tanglewood, but it’s called Wildwood.)
Fifteen years later, on a girls’ trip to East Hampton, they find themselves suspects in a crime.
Some readers said they found these three characters unlikeable.
I did not. Burke chose to have them all experience “cancellation” for a variety of reasons. Let’s just say that drama seemed to follow them around. But you could also argue that women get called unlikeable for reasons that men do not.
Other readers complained about the pandemic references, which were minimal and had more to do with the effects of the pandemic on May’s psychological state.
Yes, there were issues discussed throughout the book, from our cultural obsession with true crime to the experiences of a Black woman in majority white spaces, to anti-Asian hate during the pandemic. Most of them were tied to character development (particularly of non-white characters) so I found it interesting.
What I did object to (a little!) was the ending, which I will discuss below, along with the clues and suspects.
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Spoilers for The Note by Alafair Burke
This section will contain a list of suspects, clues, a timeline, and my interpretation of the ending explained!
There were THREE crimes in this book, which I’ll list chronologically
- The drowning of Marnie Mann at Wildwood, which was classified as an accident
- The death of Kelsey’s husband Luke Freedman during a “robbery.” She was not a suspect, but the true crime community had their doubts.
- The disappearance and death of David Smith in Easthampton. He was killed in a manner similar to Luke Freedman
My question: did the same person kill all three of them, or was it different perpetrators?
Here are the clues I noticed right off:
- Kelsey booked the Airbnb under an assumed name. Later, she says she did this because of her notoriety surrounding Luke’s death.
- May passing out and hearing a car and an emotional conversation the night that David disappeared
- The fact that there were two notes in the book: one left under David’s windshield wiper and the other sent to Wildwood to expose Lauren’s affair with the married camp director. Lauren wrote the note to David, so did she write the other one?
- David’s girlfriend tells the police that he’d been dating a woman who catfished him with an assumed name. Was that you, Kelsey?
Timeline of Important Events in The Note by Alafair Burke
Because I got super confused about who was where and what happened when, I made you a timeline!
- 1993: Kelsey’s mom dies
- 1999: May, Marnie and Kelsey arrive at Wildwood as campers at age 13
- 2000: Lauren arrives to head the music program at Wildwood. May says that Lauren is nine years older, so the campers were 14 and Lauren was 23.
- 2003: Lauren starts an affair with Thomas, the camp’s founder, when she was 26 and he was 50.
- 2004-5: Kelsey’s father abruptly divorces his second wife Jeanie, Nate’s mother.
- 2008: The summer after college graduation, May, Kelsey and Marnie return to Wildwood as counselors.
- 2008 was the summer was when Marnie died AND when May was dating Kelsey’s brother Nate AND when Lauren’s affair got outed by the mysterious note. Furthermore, we learn that David was dating Marnie. After Marnie’s death, Lauren, already under the spotlight for the affair, gets scapegoated for not supervising the counselors and she leaves the camp that summer.
- 2018: Luke, Kelsey’s husband, is shot and killed in an apparent robbery.
- 2023: the present time of the book, in which David Smith dies.
HOW IS ALL THIS CONNECTED?
The Main Characters and my level of suspicion of them
- May (high): with her anger management problems and her tendency to get drunk or high when important stuff happens, I had to wonder if she was an unreliable narrator.
- Kelsey (high): bad stuff also seems to follow her around. She is connected to all three deaths.
- Nate (medium): the fact that he was around when Marnie died is suspicious, but he seemed to show up after David disappeared.
- William Ellis (medium): May tries to make a case for William, Kelsey’s dad, having something to do with the death of Luke, but his motive for killing David and Marnie seems weak.
- Lauren (medium): she was also around when bad things happened, but she doesn’t seem to have a motive to kill anyone.
- David (medium): could he have killed Marnie and then Luke? But then who would have killed him?
- Josh (low): the long-suffering boyfriend has been the culprit in a few books I’ve read recently, but he seems not to be a part of this girl group’s shenanigans.
The Note by Alafair Burke: The Ending Explained
Nate, Kelsey’s stepbrother, was the killer of Marnie, Luke, and David.
- Nate killed Marnie because she saw Nate and Kelsey together. Yes, Nate was madly in love with his step-sibling Kelsey, which is what triggered William and Jeanie’s divorce.
- Then Nate killed Kelsey’s husband Luke so that Kelsey could have control of her frozen embryos. After learning that she had the BRCA1 mutation, Kelsey had a prophylactic oophorectomy and double mastectomy. So given that her ovaries had been removed, the embryos were her only hope of having a biological child. Luke was planning to divorce her, and if that happened, she apparently couldn’t use the embryos without his consent.
- Does Nate explain why he killed David? As May and Kelsey get a confession out of him with the police waiting in another room, Nate gets up and jumps off May’s balcony.
My Questions
- May was the one who sent the anonymous note outing Lauren’s affair. She felt that Lauren was being taken advantage of. This confused me so much as I thought this happened when May was a teenager, not when she was 22 and Lauren was 29. Why didn’t she just talk to Lauren?
- Why didn’t David and Kelsey recognize each other? I guess none of them recognized each other from the summer of 2008.
- Who got custody of Gomez the pug?
Questions? Comments? Think I got something wrong? Talk to me in the comments!
Check out all the other New January 2025 Mysteries and Thrillers here!
Who’s expecting the twins???? Confused!!
I read this a couple months ago, but I am pretty sure it was Kelsey as she was the one with the frozen embryos.
How could Kelsey be pregnant if she had a hysterectomy?
That is a good question. So I went back to look. After Kelsey found out she had the BRCA1 mutation, she had a prophylactic oophorectomy and double mastectomy. So given that she had the embryos I guess she was still able to get pregnant with twins.
Correcting the post now; thanks for pointing that out 🙂