Thought-provoking but also straight-up provocative, We’ll Never Know entertains with well-crafted characters and a brisk, twisty plot, while also challenging societal norms and perceptions as it develops a resonant message about the importance of questioning authority and seeking the truth, no matter the obstacles. Readers on its wavelength—and who are comfortable with its sexual frankness and tragicomic depiction of misogyny—will find themselves engrossed from beginning to end, eager to uncover the secrets beneath the surface.
As the title suggests, a feeling of uncertainty roils the narrative. Despite the feeling of paranoia, dialogue and pacing are sharp as the tale touches on secret agents, politicians, amateur ufologists (“come to think of it, all ufologists are amateurs,” one character notes), “neo-Nazi nutjobs,” and elementary particles and the nature of gravity itself. For all the invention and comic energy, neither the unwavering intensity of the mystery nor the heady revelations ever let up until a conclusion that upends expectations—and then, for good measure, transcends them, too.
Takeaway: Twisty, literate speculative mystery finds a sexist reporter confronting everything.
Comparable Titles: Nick Harkaway, Cory Doctorow.
Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A-
WE'LL NEVER KNOW
BY MATTHEW TREE ‧ RELEASE DATE: FEB. 10, 2024
A clever, fleet-footed cross-genre story with striking characters and unexpected turns.
London journalists delve into an increasingly complex and precarious conspiracy in Tree’s thriller set a few decades in the future.
Timothy Wyndham, a noted science correspondent for an English newspaper, generally turns down readers’ requests for personal meetings. He does, however, ultimately meet with one woman, Melissa Hogg, who’s convinced that her astrophysicist husband is in danger, and she hands Timothy photographs of a reputed saucer-shaped military prototype tied to a Royal Air Force base in Somerset, England. After a scientist tied to that RAF base mysteriously dies, Timothy sees a potential story. He gets assistance, albeit reluctantly, from Cathy Edge, a journalist at his publication whose past dalliance with him ended badly. Mostly what they dig up are more questions—about a second unexplained death, a seemingly untouchable neo-Nazi, and an enigmatic American who warns them to quit nosing around. Timothy and Cathy are dead set on getting their exclusive, provided they can stay alive long enough to piece together the growing puzzle. While Tree piles on the mysteries, the memorable cast makes the dense plot easy to follow. For example, it’s always apparent whom Timothy and Cathy trust and whom they suspect are villains; the unnerving American falls into the latter camp. Timothy also has a relationship with a newspaper intern, Adalyn, who navigates their explicitly detailed trysts with him in a businesslike fashion, which effectively throws the sexist protagonist into a deserved tailspin. Timothy’s first-person narration aptly recounts banter with Cathy and blends references to real-life government programs with SF tech. The prose also shines throughout: “Time was getting on and twilight could already be inferred from the sky’s greyness, which stretched unabated over the flatness of the airfield and the countryside beyond it.”
A clever, fleet-footed cross-genre story with striking characters and unexpected turns.
Timothy Wyndham wants nothing more than to be different from his father, a drunk and chronic underachiever whose dreams of being exceptional at any of his artistic passions all failed miserably and who had endless crises of self confidence. So Tim applied himself to his studies, cultivated his abilities rather than his daydreams and set himself high but achievable ambitions.
After college, he avoided intensely competitive academia and became a science journalist. He wrote a couple of best-selling popular science books and now in his mid thirties, runs a well received scientific Q&A column in a broadsheet newspaper. He's a pompous and self-satisfied man who spends his free time seducing, banging, and dumping a succession of the newspaper's fresh-faced female interns. His current target is Adalyn, a new intern with flame-red hair and a slightly strange but very entrancing way about her.
Tim is used to letters and emails from over-invested readers but Melissa Hogg is the most insistent of them all. A middle-aged woman banging on about secret government projects and unexplained phenomena? Tim initially rolls his eyes. But it turns out that there is a secret government project and its researchers are dying in unexplained numbers. Tim's colleague and (somewhat bitter) ex-girlfriend Cathy Edge decides to investigate and pulls Tim along with her.
Meanwhile, Tim has succeeded in seducing Adalyn. Or is it the other way around? And the sex is both the best and the strangest that Tim has ever had. He can't stop thinking about it.
What ties it all together? Read on to find out!
We'll Never Know is a blend of thriller, sci-fi and eroticism. And it works really well because you're not sure which is dominant until you get to the end of the story. Government conspiracy? Alien infiltration? Or just a good excuse for some excellent bonking? You'll enjoy the journey and the end might well surprise you.
Tim's character arc is the strongest. He really does start out as a patronising and pompous sexist man whose self satisfaction blinds him to where his life has gone just as wrong as his father's, simply in a different way. He has to develop humility. The book is beautifully written in lovely flowing prose and with great dialogue, and the pace is wonderfully controlled. Tree has packed a great deal into just over two hundred pages and I really enjoyed the discipline in the storytelling.
Recommended.
