You Can't Catch Me by Catherine McKenzie

Catherine McKenzie has the ability to generate anxiety in the reader, and her latest novel continues the trend.  The anxiety is often a result of fear that the main character has taken a road that will end in disaster.  You may like and sympathize with the protagonist, but the apprehension generated by her behavior just keeps building.

You Can't Catch Me has two principal threads--one in the present and one in the past.  

from description:  After being fired from her investigative journalism job for plagiarism, Jessica Williams is looking for a break from the constant press coverage. She decides to escape for a week to a resort in Mexico boasting no connections to the outside world. While waiting at the airport for her flight, she encounters a woman with the exact same name, who she dubs Jessica Two. Drawn together by the coincidence, they play a game of twenty questions to see what other similarities they share, and exchange contact information.

The game of twenty questions is clever.  "Jessica Two's" game has elicited answers to questions that will enable her to Jessica Williams' bank account.  Our Jessica on finding her recent settlement money gone, sets out to find "Jessica Two."

The connection to the past is our Jessica's having been raised in a cult which she escaped when she was eighteen.  These sections alternate with the present search for "Jessica Two."

You can count on plenty of twists from Catherine McKenzie.  There are more Jessica Williams that have been tricked and had their accounts emptied, and each one is given a number.  

I really liked McKenzie's last book (I'll Never Tell), but this one didn't work as well for me.  Yes, the suspense was intense as worry for Jessica One increases, and yes, it is slick and manipulative, and yes, the grand twist was a surprise...and yet....  

Read in February.  Blog review scheduled for May 18.

NetGalley/Lake Union Publishing
Suspense.  June 9, 2020.  Print length:  355 pages.