Maybe everybody didn’t know, but Kevin Tipple knew I was out of town for most of this last week. So, his timing was perfect when he sent a review to include here. He’s going to discuss Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper. Thank you, Kevin!

Mae Pruett lives in Los Angeles and does “black-bag” publicity jobs for a crisis management firm in Everybody Knows: A Novel by Jordan Harper. Her job is to keep bad news out of the press at all costs or, at the very least, spin the event or incident into more positive news coverage. Her firm shapes the news we see for celebrities. The real facts of the situations, the dirt and what Hollywood does to all involved, especially the kid stars, stays hidden from view.

That is until her boss at Mitnick & Associates is killed in the street in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Mae Pruett was supposed to be meeting him for a drink and to talk. Lucky for her, she was running a few minutes late. So, she missed the shooting in what is now being billed as an attempted carjacking gone wrong. Mae can read between the lines and knows the media story being pushed hard is utter nonsense. She knows because what to look for and who is reporting the stuff. She also knows because Dan was being weird just before he was killed and had some sort of plan to make him and her rich.

She owed Dan for bringing her into the biggest PR firm in the city. She wonders why the machine is working so hard to spin the story. She wonders what he was planning that got him killed. What was he planning? What did he know? She has a couple of ideas and begins to dig. What she finds is the kind of stuff that gives one a waking nightmare if they are not murdered first.

A lot of people will be as Mae uncovers secrets and desperately tries to stay alive.

Everybody Knows: A Novel is a darkly cynical read and a commentary on pop culture and the entertainment industry. It is a complex and noir style mystery tale where evil almost always wins out in the end simply because so many are employed to make sure that happens. It is also one of those books that one wonders how many names have been changed to protect the scumbags among us?

It is also one heck of a complicated read that is well worth your time. Everybody Knows: A Novel easily makes my top five book list of reads so far this year. It packs quite a punch from beginning to end. It might also make you think twice the next time you see a story on a celebrity.

My reading copy came from the Central or Downtown Branch of the Dallas Public Library System.

Kevin R. Tipple ©2023