Book review of Tell Me What You Did, a novel by Carter Wilson (Poison Pen Press 2025, 400+ p.)
A chilling psychological thriller that, despite serious foreshadowing, will keep you guessing, told by a plucky podcaster whose unspeakable secrets have come to define her
Poe Web hosts a popular true crime podcast out of her house in Burlington, Vermont. She grew up in Manchester, New Hampshire and spent a couple of years in New York City before taking refuge in the Green Mountain State. As the story begins, it’s almost Halloween and a ghost walks into Poe’s already haunted life.
Poe invites strangers to confess to crimes on her eponymous podcast, Tell Me What You Did. And it seems a lot of people are happy, if not eager, to do just that, even knowing Poe can’t and won’t protect them from revenge or legal repercussions. Hundreds of thousand of people listen and download these stories, if you can believe it. (I can’t.) Poe and her producer/boyfriend Kip make a six-figure living from podcasting once a week. Not a bad life — until one Ian Hindley shows up in her Zoom green room.
Interspersed among the one hundred chapters, almost all cliff-hangers, are transcripts of a live-streamed conversation between Poe and Hindley, who had recently confessed on her show to killing Poe’s mother 17 years ago as 13-year-old Poe watched him slash her mother to bleed to death in bed after having sex with her.
While it’s quite clear from the outset that Hindley is a creep, Poe doesn’t believe he’s the murderer, because she identified the culprit as one Leopold Hutchins and then killed him in New York City seven years ago. But when Hindley reveals intimate details of her mom’s murder, she doesn’t know what to think. And when he tells her “I know what you did in New York,” she freaks out.
That live-stream podcast that keeps popping up between chapters takes place on Halloween, a week or two after the events bracketing it. It’s a lot of foreshadowing, maybe too much. Hindley threatens grave consequences unless she tells the world how she stalked and killed Hutchins. This intermittent stream of revelations keeps coming for 63 chapters. Why didn’t Wilson place the entirety of Poe’s confession toward the end, where it belongs? Perhaps he doled it out passim because it takes up so many pages, but it still struck me as intrusive, if not a major spoiler. For whatever reasons, Wilson chose to do it that way, so who am I to quibble?
Hindley is able to force Poe to confess to her deed in New York in great detail because he has a hostage whom he mutilates to show he means business. At first, it’s not clear who that is; all we are told that its a male. It takes 80 chapters for us to understand why Poe acquiesces, but that only adds to the suspense.
Wilson is bloody good at creating dramatic cruxes and conveying visceral reactions. I just wish he wouldn’t do it so bloody often, because his tendency to overstate feelings of terror and helplessness made me wish his roller coaster of a story didn’t have so many bumps.
He paints a convincing picture of Hindley: A tall, emaciated, unkempt scarecrow of a man, with hollow cheeks and penetrating green eyes. But also articulate and completely composed, even when he’s issuing ominous threats and relentlessly stalking her.
His portrait of Poe is somewhat sketchy. I had difficulty visualizing her, especially as a woman. Her birth name is Dylan Poe Webb. Dylan is an unusual name for a girl, but she lets that slide. She goes by Poe, a not-so-subtle literary allusion. And having her fraught situation boil over on Halloween is a bit of a trope.
The novel is written in first-person, present tense, narrated by Poe. She spends more time talking about her alcohol consumption than what she looks like, a missed opportunity to flesh her out. Wilson gives her dad, who plays an important role, more background, but then he skimps on describing Kip, also a central character. Neither is as lovingly described as her adorable loyal black Lab, Bailey, who tries to coexist with Grimm, Poe’s dad’s nasty old cat. Both animals get a lot of exposure, and while the plot doesn’t need them, they add a humane element.
I found myself wondering why Poe’s dog’s name rings a bell, but then remembered. Bailey must be an old soul.
Throughout the book, Hindley shows a remarkable talent for sleuthing and psyching Poe out. He electronically spies on her house, and when she and her father rent a chalet in Stowe to escape his relentless stalking, he somehow knows where to find them. Later on, he breaks into a house, presuming Poe will find him there even though he drops no clues.
It is only in the penultimate scene that Hindley mouths what has motivated him to terrorize Poe and torture her to death. It’s something that Poe might have guessed while replaying what she did over and over but failed to make the connection. You might not either. Wilson is skilled at hiding truth in plain sight.
It’s a safe bet that a thriller will leave its protagonist(s) bruised if not seriously injured and maybe event contrite, but ready to fight another day.
Spoiler Alert
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And Tell Me What You Did doesn’t disappoint on that score. But as good guys need to uphold moral values, Poe has to pay for her sins. It’s only fair, but the pain will be over soon.
Carter Wilson is the USA Today bestselling author of eight critically acclaimed, standalone psychological thrillers. He is an ITW Thriller Award finalist, a five-time winner of the Colorado Book Award, and his works have been optioned for television and film. Carter lives outside of Boulder, Colorado. Find him at carterwilson.com. He’s also a pretty good amateur photographer.
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