'Before you knew my name' by Jacqueline Bublitz

‘Before you knew my name’ by Jacqueline Bublitz is a book hot off the press, a debut novel published in May 2021. I loved from the first page to the last. Seemingly a who-dunnit, two women are main characters – the pretty young girl who gets murdered, and the 30something woman who finds her body on an early-morning run. The book finishes with the identification of the murderer.

This conventional thriller material is turned into something entirely different. A detective who cleverly pieces the puzzle together to identify the murder is not the main story – while there is a detective he’s a side character, and not responsible for finding the murderer.

The story is told by Alice, the 18-year old murder victim. She tells about her life from the nowhere land after death, where she’s trapped – because people don’t know who she is? She’s narrating what brought her to New York, the people who were important in her life, and now she’s observing Ruby.

Ruby, the woman who escaped Melbourne to detox from a lover who’s about to marry another woman. Ruby who is traumatised by finding the body.

Ruby’s perspective is one rarely explored – how does it affect a person to find a murder victim? Ruby, already at a loss on her own in a strange if fascinating city, torn between her desire to cut the connection to her lover, yet tied to his occasional text messages by sheer absence of other contacts. Finding the unknown girl’s body places death in the centre of her thoughts. She researches murder victims, she joins a death café and establishes new connections.

I love the clever insights that appear unexpectedly. “I’m puzzled by the thought that truth hurts. I think that lies cause all the problems.” A thought Alice shares early on in the book made me realise I’d found a treasure.

Several themes are touched upon in the book – trauma, abandonment, abuse, death, violence against woman, white privilege – these topics are all there, yet none of them explored in a manner that becomes heavy. Those themes are touched upon, lightly, and beautifully packaged. Lightly does not mean superficially, to the contrary, reading this book has left me with food for thought.

A wonderful book; highly recommended!