Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper

Genre: Noir Crime

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Welcome to Mae Pruett’s Los Angeles, where “Nobody talks. But everybody whispers.” As a “black-bag” publicist tasked not with letting the good news out but keeping the bad news in, Mae works for one of LA’s most powerful and sought-after crisis PR firms, at the center of a sprawling web of lawyers, PR flaks, and private security firms she calls “The Beast.” They protect the rich and powerful and depraved by any means necessary.

After her boss is gunned down in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel in a random attack, Mae takes it upon herself to investigate and runs headfirst into The Beast’s lawless machinations and the twisted systems it exists to perpetuate. It takes her on a roving neon joyride through a Los Angeles full of influencers pumped full of pills and fillers; sprawling mansions footsteps away from sprawling homeless encampments; crooked cops and mysterious wrecking crews in the middle of the night.

Edgar Award-winner Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows is addicting and alarming, a “juggernaut of a novel” and “an absolute tour de force.” It is what the crime novel can achieve in the modern age: portray the human lives at the center of vast American landscapes, and make us thrill at their attempts to face impossible odds.

Review of Everybody Knows

Honestly, this book was a bit hard for me to get into at first, but by the end, I was totally hooked. Perhaps it was just the difficult subject matter. This book deals with some very dark themes such as sexual abuse, trafficking, and violence.

There are two protagonists: Mae Pruett, a black-bag PR publicist in Los Angeles, and Chris Tamburro, an ex-cop who now works as an enforcer. The POV alternates between the two of them, although the whole book is written in third-person.

There’s plenty to dislike about both protagonists, but Jordan Harper gives them enough depth that the reader can find a way to sympathize with them.

Two Slimy Protagonists with a Chance at Redemption

When we first meet Mae in Chapter 1, she comes across as slimy, but she still has a heart. We learn that she specializes in “black-bag PR” – in other words, keeping bad news contained for powerful people. The first scene of the book shows her attempting to protect the reputation of a washed-up actress named Hannah Heard.

It’s clear that everyone else on Hannah’s team has given up on the actress. No one wants to help salvage her career. But Mae decides to do it out of anger – “just to show them she can do it.” She muses on the nature of the film industry, how men get second chances but women are pushed off the cliff. As a reader, I felt that anger Mae was feeling over the misogyny. It made me identify with her character, despite the shady things she does as a black-bag publicist.

Chris was the harder character for me to identify with – perhaps because he has less empathy than Mae and commits violence as part of his role. He works as an enforcer for BlackGuard, a private security firm that provides many “unsaid” services.

When we first meet Chris, he’s beating up a man who leaked an unflattering story about the son of BlackGuard’s owner. The worst part is that Chris “doesn’t feel anything while he hurts” this guy. It’s very hard to identify with someone so cold and violent.

Despite the many flaws in these two protagonists, the story ultimately offers them a chance at redemption. Both of them show growth over the course of the book, but in the end, they remain two very complex, broken people doing the best they can in a messed-up world.

Plot of Everybody Knows

The plot of this book was very twisty, yet everything came together so neatly. Jordan Harper sets up intricate connections in the beginning that the reader doesn’t even notice, but then once they come to light, it makes perfect sense. I won’t say too much to avoid spoilers, but I appreciated how cleverly this book was plotted.

The main mystery in this novel is the murder of Mae’s boss, Dan Hennigan. On the surface, it looks like a random carjacking gone wrong. Except for the fact that Dan told Mae about a lucrative, illegal business he was getting involved with the day before he was shot. The only problem is that Mae didn’t get any details out of him before his death. Yet, she’s certain whatever he got mixed up with, it’s the real reason he was killed.

Mae starts to investigate Dan’s death and ends up crossing paths with Chris. Turns out BlackGuard has tasked him with looking into Dan’s death as well. The two of them start to work the mystery together, and before they know it, they’ve walked right into a tangled web of crime and deceit. At the center of it lies a pregnant teenager who is described as “walking blackmail.”

The more Mae and Chris uncover, the clearer it becomes that they’re up against an impossibly strong opponent: what Mae calls “the Beast,” the network of professionals working to cover up the crimes of the rich and powerful. Although there is almost no hope of them winning this fight, Mae persists anyway, sacrificing more and more of the carefully constructed life she’s built for herself.

The story ends on an uncertain note. We don’t get to see the outcome of the final events, but it doesn’t matter. Mae and Chris have completed their character arcs. It’s enough to know that they’ve changed, even if the world may not.

Mae and Chris’s Character Arcs

By the end of the story, Mae has completed her character arc from a complacent publicist to a rebel fighting an impossibly huge opponent. Inversely, Chris has lost all desire to fight and inflict violence on others. He talks about living a simpler life with Mae away from all the seediness of LA – “Find something good to do. Not fighting bad. Doing something good. Me and you.”

Ultimately, though, Mae tells Chris the line she repeats to herself throughout the story: “I am a bullet.” She continues on, “They didn’t change me or corrupt me. They just saw what I was good for and they used it. It’s not going to change. But maybe I can point the gun the other way.”

While Mae has learned how to fight for something, Chris learned how to let things go and move on from the violence he has known all his life.

Rating

This book is a solid 4.5 stars out of 5. The plotting was clever, and the character growth was incredible. I really appreciated that Jordan Harper created such convincing and meaningful character arcs for both Mae and Chris.

Most of all, this book has atmosphere. The city of Los Angeles was almost like a character in itself, that’s how important it was to the story. Harper did a wonderful job immersing the reader in his version of LA.

The only criticism I have is that it felt a bit pointless to switch between two different POVs because the narrative voice remained fairly consistent across the book. I didn’t feel like I was necessarily hearing Mae or Chris’s individual voice. However, it did make for some dramatic irony when the audience held pieces of the puzzle that either Mae or Chris didn’t know yet.

Overall, this book is a bit of a depressing read, but it’s gripping. I highly recommend it for mystery fans, particularly those who like noir. I found myself chewing on the themes long after finishing Everybody Knows – and that’s the mark of an excellent book.