WHAT NEVER HAPPENED by Rachel Howzell Hall – Review

I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

What Never Happened by Rachel Howzell Hall
Published by Thomas & Mercer on August 1 2023
Genres: Adult, Thriller
Pages: 428
Format: Finished hardcover
Source: Publisher
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The nitty-gritty: With colorful characters and an intriguing setting, What Never Happened is a fun mystery with some great twists.

Rachel Howzell Hall is a new author for me, and I’m so glad I had the chance to read her latest book. This was a fun, boisterous, guilty pleasure of a story. It’s not perfect, and I can’t say I liked all the characters. But as far as entertainment value goes, the mystery kept me guessing, the setting was new and interesting, and I had a lot of sympathy for the main character Coco, who is just trying to figure out her life.

Colette “Coco” Weber is returning to Catalina Island after living in Los Angeles for the past twenty years, and she’s not happy about it. Twenty years ago, when she was sixteen, her mother, father and brother were murdered during a home invasion, and Coco only survived because she snuck out to be with her friends that night. At the time, her Aunt Gwen agreed to take care of her until she came of age. Now Gwen lives alone in the house Coco inherited from her parents, and due to memory problems, she needs a caretaker. Coco agrees to temporarily move in with Gwen and keep an eye on her, with the intention of wrapping up some loose ends, selling the house, and taking Gwen back to L.A. with her. After all, there are no happy memories for Coco on the island, and she’s still dealing with PTSD from the trauma of that terrible night.

Once she settles into the creaky old house, the past comes flooding back. Gwen clearly doesn’t want her there, and even her college friend Maddy, who runs the local newspaper and has offered Coco a job writing obituaries, seems to be hiding something. And when widows around town begin dying under mysterious circumstances, Coco decides to investigate. Someone is sending her threatening notes and wants her to leave, but Coco is determined to stay and bring justice to the dead women, even if no one believes her.

So there is a lot going on in What Never Happened, maybe too much, which makes the plot a bit chaotic at times. You have the dying widows, a mystery that Coco is determine to solve. The man who was convicted of killing her family—wrongfully, it turns out—has just been released from prison, and now Coco has to face the fact that the murderer might still be out there. There’s a side romance with a man named Noah who also works for the paper. Coco is also trying to fix up the house and get it ready to sell, no easy task, it turns out, on a small island cut off from the mainland. And she’s in the middle of a divorce as well. Her soon-to-be-ex husband Micah thinks she’s stolen a valuable ring from him and is sending her threatening messages. And to top it all off, Hall sets her story in the weeks leading up to the Covid-19 lockdowns. Whew! That’s a lot to cram into one book, although the author does a pretty good job of keeping all her plates in the air.

However, the things I loved about this book make up for it’s shortcomings. Let’s start with Coco. I absolutely loved her voice. She’s feisty, excitable and very much down to earth. She’s had to cope with a lot, I mean just imagine if you had lost your family in one fell swoop like she did? Her aunt Gwen is terrible to her and is trying to get her to leave, but Coco cares for her anyway. As one of the only Black people on the island, she deals with racism on a daily basis (even her “boyfriend” Noah makes some racist comments). Coco majored in journalism at UCLA and now writes obituaries for a living, which I thought was pretty cool. We get examples of these scattered throughout the book, and they were highly entertaining. The story is told from Coco’s first person POV, so her quirky style is front and center.

The setting of Catalina Island is almost a character itself. The story takes place in Avalon, the main city on the island, and the author paints a vivid picture of a place only accessible by ferry (or helicopter), an insular place where the locals all know one another and outsiders are treated as such. I loved the combination of beauty and danger. The island is full of indigenous poisonous plants, unpredictable weather, and of course, hundreds of dangerous, free roaming buffalo. Because of the size of the island, only a certain number of cars are allowed, so most people drive golf carts instead. And in this story, there is at least one killer on the loose, which adds to the excitement. With real estate prices through the roof, a housing shortage, and a lack of resources, I can firmly state that I would never want to live there!

At first I was worried about the Covid element. Like many other readers, I’m sort of over stories that take place during the pandemic, but luckily Hall puts a different spin on hers by setting it during the very early days, when no one knew anything about the virus and everything was speculation. This added to the growing sense of dread, especially when lockdowns were put in place and Coco finds herself literally stuck on the island with a killer.

There are two main mysteries going on. First, there’s the mystery of the local women who are mysteriously dying, although at first Coco is the only one who notices something fishy is going on. Hall inserts chapters from the murdered women’s point of view as they are dying, which was very creepy and effective. There’s also the mystery of who is harassing Coco and sending her death threats. I thought the author did a great job of interweaving these two mysteries and keeping the reader guessing. I loved that the harasser writes fake obituaries to Coco to try to scare her, they were creepy and a bit shocking! 

The ending was over-the-top, but still a lot of fun. The author even throws in a feel-good epilogue that made me shed a tear or two. I’m very glad I took a chance on Rachel Howzell Hall, and I’ll be eagerly awaiting her next book.

Big thanks to the publisher and Sparkpoint Studio for the review copy.