Keep This For Me
Jennifer Fawcett
Atria, 2025, $29
When Fiona was just a toddler, her parents were attacked by serial killer Edward Ward on a dark and desolate road in Northern New York. Her father survived, seriously injured, and her mother’s body was never found, although seven other bodies were later recovered from Ward’s backyard. Now, on his prison deathbed, Ward has said that he didn’t kill Fiona’s mother, Ana. She had slipped from his grasp into the waters of Lake Ontario and vanished.
Fiona flies home from the West Coast to the tiny Northern New York town of St. Thomas in hopes of interrogating Ward about just what did happen that night, but he dies before she can see him, leaving her frustrated and unsure if she should stay or go. Her life back home in flux, the notion that her mother might have survived the encounter but chosen not to come home gnawing at her gut, she opts to stay a while in the cottage she knew so well as a child and dig around for answers.
Ward’s son Jason and his taciturn mother never left town, despite facing near-universal ostracization and their own unanswered questions. Jason been 11 when, thanks to Fiona’s father, Eddie was apprehended. From the age of five, his father had been bringing him random souvenirs from long-haul trucking missions, and despite realizing after the fact that they’re probably trophies collected during murders, his own longing for comprehension leads him to hold on to the macabre collection.
David, Fiona’s childhood best friend, is still in St. Thomas too, having followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the police force. He’s the one who alerted Fiona to Eddie Ward’s deathbed claim that Ana had escaped, and David wants to help her find the answers she’s after, but when another young woman disappears on a dark and desolate road, his job suddenly becomes all-consuming.
Hudson Valley-based author Fawcett says that the seed for this book was planted when she read a news story about a pair of serial killers, father and son, whose victims had included a young couple whose car had broken down on a remote road. The story led her to begin wondering how survivors’ lives would play out in the wake of such nearly unbearable tragedy. Her talent is such that the reader feels, through Fiona’s first-person narration juxtaposed with Jason’s life then and now and glimpses of Ana’s experience on the night tragedy struck, as if they’re spying on real people. Fawcett expertly layers the multiple points of view and builds suspense in many directions at once. What is Fiona running from? Does her childhood friendship with David have the potential to grow into a romance? Is Jason a fellow victim or is he walking in Eddie’s footsteps? What really happened on that night long ago?
Tension builds like Great Lakes chop, as Fiona seeks answers, David works the current case while trying to keep her safe, and Jason suffers from an increase of the nearly unbearable pressure that has shaped his entire life. Matters are complicated when the killer’s granddaughter becomes fixated on Fiona, making awkwardly intense efforts at friendship that Fiona resents and pities.
Through it all, Lake Ontario is an ever-present character, cold and deep, gorgeous and terrible, capable of concealing secrets even from those who think they know it best.
Fiona’s father had moved all the way across the country with her when the anguish of his loss became intermingled with fresh fear that Jason might be targeting his daughter. As can happen in the wake of any tragedy, too many things have gone unspoken, and Fiona has grown into a kind, brave, and brilliant soul who considers herself to be fatally flawed. As we learn what she is running from, and how history may be in danger of repeating itself in more ways than one, the book becomes a masterful meditation on mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and the underbelly of life in a bucolic but desolate small town.
The climax of all this will have you frantically turning pages and there’s an excruciating twist that will make you gasp. This is a genre-transcending book by a writer with a fine-tuned grasp of the human heart, whose language flows like water—and boy, can she swim in it. Not to be missed.
This article appears in November 2025.
