The Advice Column Mystery

In the beginning of Jessa Maxwell’s I Need You to Read This we are introduced to Francis Keen, long time writer of the Dear Constance column in the New York Herald newspaper, only to witness her last moments, as she is stabbed to death in her beach home.

Some months later the story picks up with Alex Marks, a seemingly shy woman with few friends who moved, some time ago, to the Big Apple to start life over again. She works from home writing promotional copy for a pharmaceutical firm. One morning she learns from one of the regulars at the diner where she usually has breakfast that the Herald is recruiting to replace Francis Keen as writer of the Dear Constance column. At home that evening, over a lonely bottle of wine, she impulsively goes online and completes the application for the job, which requires her to write a response to a sample letter to Dear Constance.

Despite the long odds, Alex gets the job. She was an avid reader of Dear Constance, so she finds it comes easy to her to find the right responses to letters - ones that Francis would have written - and she is, it turns out, a pretty perceptive individual able to read people quite quickly.

But she is troubled that what happened at the beach house is still a mystery that’s not been solved. No one has been charged with Francis’ murder. As she begins her new career at the Herald she learns more about Francis, the details of her life, and the people who were closest to her. She finds herself compelled to try to uncover who murdered Francis.

As Alex begins to gather clues, she starts to receive cryptic and threatening letters as details of her own past begin to emerge, a past that she’s been running away from since moving to New York. There is danger for Alex coming not just from her sleuthing into Francis’ murder but from her own secrets.

Jessa Maxwell has written a tight thriller/mystery that moves quickly and carries you along. I read the book in two sittings and found it entertaining and well done. Still, there were a few quibbles I had with the book.

One was that the scenes at the Herald all seemed off somehow. Some of that was purposefully done to add drama (and some red herrings) and keep you on your toes as a reader, and I respect most of that. What I found less than convincing at the Herald was the character of Alex’s boss, the editor. He’s of a type - a throwback to an older generation of newspeople who I don’t think you find in newsrooms these days. He seemed to me to be too much of a stock character.

The other quibble had to do with Alex’s back story and why she was running away and hiding from her past. I just felt that the difficulties she got into in that back story didn’t really fit with the Alex of the Herald - an instant success as an advice columnist due to her ability to size up people and to display an innate perceptiveness into human behavior. I don’t want to give too much away so I’ll just say that I found that disconnect to really detract from the believability of the book.

But, that’s probably too heavy an analysis for what is meant to be a fun summer thriller - and despite those quibbles of mine I did enjoy the book.

RATING: Three and a Half Stars ⭐⭐⭐🌠

RATING COMMENTS: A tightly drawn thriller/mystery follows the new writer of a newspaper advice column. As she digs into the murder of her predecessor, she also faces danger from her own past secrets.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I read an advanced reviewer’s copy of the book courtesy of NetGalley and publisher Atria Books. The book just became available on Tuesday of this week.