Hard to relate to the main character. After all those years you'd think she'd get a backbone. Waiting for a big reveal that never happened. It was ok.

The beginning of the novel was difficult to get into, but once I got into the meat of the story I couldn't put it down.

I’D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE by Laura Lippman begins with Eliza living a typical housewife life. The story continues for another 40 or so pages with descriptions of Eliza’s interactions with her children and her remembrances of growing up with her jealous and nasty sister. But what does all this have to do with the story, you wonder. Not much.

Then Eliza receives a letter. It is written by a female hand but is from her rapist.

Eliza had been abducted when she was 15-years-old. Her abductor was trying to find a girlfriend. Really. He grabbed countless, but at least three, girls and killed all but one—Eliza. He raped Eliza.

Now, shortly before his scheduled execution, he wants to speak with Eliza. So he dictates a letter to a woman who is against the death penalty, who has befriended him, and she mails the letter to Eliza. Really. It’s that easy for a rapist to contact his victim from prison, at least in this story.

Eliza, rather than contacting the authorities about this, goes through the trouble of having a separate telephone line installed in her house just for the rapist’s calls. Really.

And, remember, prisoners must make their calls collect. She accepts the charges. Really.

But now he says he wants to speak with her in person. So she arranges a last-minute-before-they-execute-him visit because her sister just happens to know all the right people. Really.

Eliza thinks he’s going to be honest with her. Really.

I was so disappointed in I’D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE! This story made me want to scream at all the characters. They all do stupid things. I list only a few here. (The least stupid is Eliza’s sister, the one who she remembers as such an awful person.)

Besides, every single page of this book has something wrong with it: if a character isn’t doing something stupid, something implausible is happening or paragraphs are rambling on and on about something that has nothing to do with the story.

This is an honest review of a book I won from the librarything.com Early Reviewer program. It was an early look at the paperback edition of the book.