Before You Knew My Name

Starred review from September 12, 2022
Bublitz’s powerful, heartrending debut follows two jilted women who move to Manhattan. Alice Lee leaves small-town Wisconsin on her 18th birthday after her former teacher ends their affair. Ruby Jones, 36, departs Melbourne, Australia, when she realizes the coworker she’s been sleeping with still intends to marry his fiancée. Though Alice and Ruby arrive in New York almost simultaneously and rent places mere streets from each other, their paths don’t cross until a month later, when someone rapes and murders Alice in Riverside Park, and Ruby finds the corpse. Alice had no wallet and nobody reports her missing, so she becomes a Jane Doe. Her spirit lingers, however, nudging Ruby to investigate the true identity of “Riverside Jane” while living her own life more fully. Alice narrates from beyond the grave, intercutting her and Ruby’s stories to maximize tension, resonance, and drive. Using keenly rendered characters and poignant prose, Bublitz crafts a richly textured, deeply feminist murder mystery that spotlights the victim rather than her killer. Readers will eagerly await Bublitz’s next. Agent: Rebecca Wearmouth, Peters, Fraser, & Dunlop (U.K.).

March 16, 2021
We know the phrase from books, from crime shows, from the news: ‘The body was found by a jogger.’ Someone is murdered and somebody else finds them, while just going about their day. That’s the end of their story—but not in this debut novel. Ruby Jones, escaping a complicated relationship in Australia, is the one who finds the body of Alice Lee in New York’s Riverside Park, and the discovery does not let her go. Nobody knows—yet—that Alice was escaping her own complications, and that she is watching Ruby’s quest to find out more about her. When Ruby meets kind-yet-chaotic embalmer Lennie Lau and joins her Death Club—a haven for people who have brushed up against death—it lights a new path for both Ruby and Alice. Before You Knew My Name is not an action thriller, but no moment is wasted. It’s beautifully written and soft but doesn’t shy away from blood and savagery, the great tearing loss of grief or the way women live in order to avoid exactly what happened to Alice. Yet Jacqueline Bublitz turns a story of murder into one of hope, in which kindness is a stronger currency than police work and the dead do not really leave us. Alice is a gentle guide for both the reader and for Ruby, though flinches whenever she presses too hard at the memories of her death and its reverberations. This is a lyrical story for those looking for the atmosphere of The Lovely Bones and the gratifying slow burn of Aoife Clifford or Anna George. Fiona Hardy is a children’s author and a bookseller at Readings Carlton.