I Have Some Questions For You

by Rebecca Makkai ★★★★★

I'm admittedly late to the party on I Have Some Questions For You, Rebecca Makkai's 2023 mystery about a decades-old death at an elite private boarding school, but late is better than never, and I'm glad I got around to reading this captivating page-turner.

The novel opens in 2018, when Bodie Kane, alumna of The Granby School, is invited back to teach a brief two-week "mini-mester" course on film and podcasting at the boarding school. Bodie is a bit of an authority on the subject—she's one of the co-hosts of the popular "Starlet Fever" podcast that examines the lives of women in Old Hollywood. For her class, she leaves the subject of their podcast up to the students. When one student is determined to make her podcast about the 1995 death of Granby student Thalia Keith, the memories of that year—Bodie's senior year—come flooding back. Not only was Thalia Bodie's classmate; she was also Bodie's roommate.

The project moves forward, and so does the novel, interjecting flashbacks to Bodie's time at Granby while exploring different hypothetical perpetrators of the crime. The murder happened on campus, and there are several likely and potential suspects. An athletic trainer at the school, Omar Evans, is in prison for the murder, and while there is significant evidence that points to him, there are also enough cracks in that case to suspect that they may have pinned this on the wrong man. While Bodie's student works through angles of the case, Bodie does the same on the side, and begins to zero in on her own prime suspect.

Makkai centers the story on uncovering the truth of Thalia Keith's murder, but she also peppers in several side topics, including cancel culture and social media, the potential predatory nature of men in positions of power, the obsessive online true crime community, and the tendency for society to blame women even when they are the victim of a crime. She creates a believable canvas of suspects, to the point where more than half a dozen people had motive, means, and opportunity to commit the murder, and any could have been believably revealed to be the killer. Some reviews compare I Have Some Questions For You to Donna Tartt's A Secret History, and I think that's apt. The common themes you see in books set at elite boarding schools—entitlement, an insular environment, the potential for group-think, the commitment to keeping secrets—are present in both books, and if you enjoyed one you'll almost certainly enjoy the other. I Have Some Questions For You is on the longer side for the genre, clocking in at nearly 450 pages, and there's some bits of bloat, but it kept me guessing and ultimately left me fully satisfied and entertained.