Spoilers!
The lifeblood for any author is that tantalizing question, “What if?” Author C.J. Tudor was driving along the motorway in England one day, and wondered what she would do if she saw her daughter in someone else’s car when she knew she was home asleep. What if, though? So begins the premise of her 2020 book, The Other People, which also plays on the notion that terrible, senseless crimes only happen to “other people.” It fascinates me how a simple what if scenario can develop into the book Tudor wrote, seeded with nuanced characters, moral ambiguity, deeper lore for the concept of the “other people,” and even a hint of the supernatural. While not all of it landed for me, mostly the supernatural climax, I enjoyed Tudor’s book. She started with, “What if?” and kept me reading to understand who, what, when, how, and of course, most nebulous of all, why.
Gabe is father to Isabella, or Izzy, and husband to Jenny. One day, he’s driving home (seemingly) when he sees what he thinks is Izzy in the back of a car when he knows she should be home getting ready for bed. After all, he’s intending to read her a bedtime story. He gives chase momentarily before deciding to visit a service station and call home to check that everything is okay. Instead, a police detective answers. Jenny is dead. Izzy is dead. He has to shore up his own alibi for their murders. But wait, didn’t he see her?! Now, three years later and after having been cleared of their deaths, so begins Gabe’s grief-leaden odyssey up and down the English motorway, living out of his van and on cheap diner coffee, hoping to find Izzy, to confirm he wasn’t crazy and delusional. The reason the police think Izzy is absolutely dead is that her grandfather, Harry, identified her body. Even so, Gabe maintains his lonely automotive vigil.
Meanwhile, Katie, who has two kids, Sam and Gracie, is the middle child of three siblings. The oldest is estranged and aloof. Lucy is the youngest and jumps from one bad guy to another, and has a child of her own. Their mother is an alcoholic, and their dad was murdered in a random home break-in gone wrong. Katie and her family are the “other people,” just like Gabe. Similarly, we have a story of a woman named Fran on the run with an 8 year girl named Alice. On the run from who or what? It’s not known. The main issue is that Alice has narcolepsy, so she tends to fall asleep, imperiling her sometimes, and she carries around a rucksack of pebbles. There’s also a few interludes italicized of a “pale girl in a white room” hooked up to machines. Fran, Alice, this girl, are they more “other people”?
What a mystery! It’s always fun to see how those pieces of the puzzle will tie back to our main story with Gabe.
For his part, Gabe also has a companion of sorts known only as the Samaritan. He stopped Gabe from jumping off a bridge and killing himself. That’s all that’s really known about him other than that he’s Black and dresses in black. However, it is through the Samaritan, I believe, that Gabe learns about the Other People, a shadowy collection of similarly situated grief-leaden people who provide their “services” via the Dark Web. Their services? Avenging wrongs and enacting justice. All that they ask in return is that the requester fulfil a Favor when the time comes. That’s the deeper lore that Tudor has built into her story. It makes what happened to Gabe more of a wide-ranging conspiracy than necessarily inexplicable violence. It’s also thanks to the Samaritan that Gabe finds the vehicle he saw three years ago … with a dead body in the trunk. Fran then learns that Gabe knows about the car. And she goes to the car and is then seemingly killed or badly injured by someone. Alice is all alone. So, she calls … Katie. Fran is Katie’s oldest sister.
Katie learns that Lucy’s new boyfriend is Steve and he’s a cop. This, after Gabe was attacked and stabbed by someone wearing a cop uniform, who also absconded with Gabe’s laptop and other pertinent items. Of course, Steve is a bit of moron for wearing the police uniform while (we later learn, likely at least) working for the Other People. After Katie has taken her kids home and retrieved Alice, she realizes from one of Gabe’s old “Missing” posters that Alice is Izzy. The plot thickens! Then, shockingly, Steve shows up at the house and promptly punches Katie in the nose. He starts choking her until Alice whacks him a couple times with her pebble-leaden rucksack. They escape, and Katie texts Gabe that he has her daughter. They meet up and escape to a location Steve won’t be able to find them: a rich estate.
Why a rich estate? Well, the plot only gets crazier. In 1997, as a 17 year old, Gabe drove drunk with a few of his friends and then they ran over a 14 year old girl named … Isabella. His other buddies fled from the scene, but Gabe stayed behind. Isabella survived, but was forever in a vegetative state. Charlotte, the rich mother, decided that Gabe’s “punishment” should be visiting Isabella every Monday afternoon without fail. That’s where Gabe was when Jenny and seemingly Izzy were being murdered. Charlotte even, upon her death, turns the estate over to Gabe so that he can continue Isabella’s care as someone who knows her best. Well, him and Miriam, the 60-something live-in nurse. The most bizarre element, somehow, of this whole plot thread is that Gabe never told his wife. Jenny never knew, which put a strain on their marriage, obviously. He was too ashamed, I guess. But this is where that “nuance” comes into play with Gabe’s character because that decision is definitely a mark against him.
There’s a lot of puzzle pieces up in the air. Tudor slots them into place like this: Fran used the Other People to avenge her father, thereby having the teenager responsible for murdering her father killed; the Other People call in the Favor, which is for Fran to get close to Jenny through her own daughter, Emily, who looks strikingly like Izzy, and pave the way for someone else to enter the home, kill Jenny and Izzy, and frame Gabe for it; Fran tries to thwart the Favor, but in the process, Jenny and Emily are killed, so Fran rescues Izzy, and then to ensure their escape, she gets Harry to go along with the misidentification of Izzy at the morgue; the Samaritan in turn, who was the father of said kid, lured Fran to the abandoned vehicle from three years ago and nearly killed her; and then finally, Gabe learns who it was that had it in for him since Charlotte was dead: Miriam, who wished the rich estate to go to her instead of him. Before Miriam can kill Gabe, though, Izzy saves the day again, this time through some sort of telekinetic connection with Isabella, who is ready to finally be freed from her vegetative state. That’s where Tudor lost me a bit, taking a very grounded story and levitating off the page. Apparently, a “hint of the supernatural” is a common occurrence in her books, so maybe I’ll warm up to it with her next one!
The Other People’s cause is flawed, of course, for many reasons, but chief among them is a willingness to kill innocent people, like Jenny and who they thought was Izzy.
Oh, and Fran didn’t die at the hands of the Samaritan. She survived and is in witness protection. It seems unlikely that the Samaritan, who is presented as a capable threat and who thirsted for revenge, would have failed to kill her. Yet, it provided one last puzzle piece to slot in: Fran would have gone to the police after everything that occurred but she was spooked on the motorway when someone started chasing her. That someone? Gabe at the beginning of the book when he saw Izzy in the back of the car. What a wild twist of fate that brought it all full circle.
Like I said, notwithstanding the supernatural element that factored into the climax, this was a twisty, fun book based off a simple, “What if?” premise. I thoroughly enjoyed the ride.
