No One Will Know
by Rose Carlyle

If you’re hoping to become the heroine of a thriller, you need to make a few bad decisions. Some harmless ones to begin with, like agreeing to talk to the eccentric old lady who follows you into the cemetery and finds you crying over your boyfriend’s grave. Or calling the number she gives you to enquire about a mysterious nannying job on a remote island off the coast of Tasmania. But if you’re truly serious, you need to commit to the more significant bad decisions, too. Like moving to the aforementioned remote island without telling a single soul, as per contract. You might feel weird about the man with ‘prison tats’ who picks you up and immediately confiscates your flashlight, but that shouldn’t deter you. ‘The night is silent,’ you might think. ‘I have no idea where I am. Is this the part where Joseph takes me to his dungeon?’ Don’t worry! Rather, to really live up to your role of thriller heroine, you have to promise your baby to the childless millionaires who live in a castle-like mansion – and take the position as your own child’s nanny.

As Eve Sylvester tells herself after she ends up in this exact situation in Rose Carlyle’s new thriller No One Will Know: ‘I’d better not be critical. I’d better not even think anything critical.’ And thus, the thriller finds its willing heroine.

In Eve’s defence, she is desperate. After sailing the Pacific for six months, she is alone, penniless, and pregnant. The man she wanted to spend her life with has died in an accident, and his wealthy parents don’t want anything to do with her or their grandchild. It’s a blend of desperation and naivety that makes her such an ideal heroine for a novel of twists and turns, because despite the sea of red flags she has to traverse, she gratefully journeys on. But then, why not: Christopher and Julia Hygate ‘look like the perfect couple’ and are desperate for a child to love; they own several yachts and command a fleet of servants. What else could a baby hope for?

Eve agrees to give birth to her child on a remote island, hidden away and sworn to secrecy. The set-up might not quite follow Raymond Chandler’s rules about mystery writing when it comes to being ‘credibly motivated,’ but it perfects another one on the list: to ‘baffle a reasonably intelligent reader.’ In an interview about the inspiration for the book, Carlyle revealed that it all started with the idea of the central plot-twist of the novel, which she assumed readers would not be able to guess. Anecdotally, it worked: This reasonably intelligent reader, for one, was truly baffled.

Carlyle has had time to practice her baffling. She is a graduate of the Master of Creative Writing at the University of Auckland, and her debut, The Girl in the Mirror (2020), packed enough twisty surprises to secure a six-figure deal before publication. It went on to become an international bestseller, with numerous translations and movie rights optioned. No One Will Know uses many of the building blocks that made The Girl in the Mirror such a success and stacks them into something new yet equally thrilling. There are yachts and journeys across the ocean, which mirror Carlyle’s real-life passion for sailing and give her descriptive writing space to shine. Questions of female bodily autonomy, motherhood, and inheritance recur, too: While The Girl in the Mirror pinned the inheritance of a hundred million dollars on the birth of a baby, Eve’s child is meant to secure a treasured house in Romania. And once more there is a sense of unease when it comes to excessive wealth and the things people might be willing to do to obtain or keep it.

Both books have an ambivalent relationship with wealth. If you are rich – or aspire to be rich – in Carlyle’s thrillers, you cannot be a naïve, well-meaning heroine, but will have to lie, or scheme, or use your wealth for selfish means. (Warning: things might also not go well for you.) On the other hand, one of the core attractions of the novels is their detailed descriptions of glamour and affluence: luxurious boats that enable extensive travels and intimate encounters with the beauty of the ocean. Diamond necklaces, dazzling gowns, and tailored tuxedos. Mansions that look as if they’ve ‘fallen from heaven.’ The book offers Eve and the reader many pages to simply marvel – at scenery, at people, at the lives money facilitates:

A sandstone path leads from the beach to the entrance. One side of the lawn features three turquoise swimming pools landscaped to fit the slope, each spilling water into the next as steam rises off them. The other side boasts an expanse of lush grass bordered by beds of exuberant pink flowers.
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And the house. Three storeys of white marble soar into the sky. Ornate pillars stand before the entrance, rising the full height of the building. Arched windows open onto the balconies, where more bright flowers have overflowed their pots and burst through the wrought-iron railings.

Later, observing a party at the Hygates’ estate, Eve comes even closer to being seduced by the shimmering abundance around her:

I find Margareta a chair near the open doors and gasp at the sight of the lawn lit up like a fairyland. The pools, transformed by underwater lights into otherworldly lagoons, are surrounded by more champagne-sipping guests.
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Margareta and I sit and admire the scene. Meringue-pink clouds float in the twilight sky, and the moon hovers above the ocean like a giant topaz, spilling a pathway of light across the water. The clink of glasses and the merry chatter of guests mingles with the lively music playing over the high-tech sound system. This is the life.

This is the life, indeed. If these descriptions have made it sound as if Eve has stumbled into a fairy tale, you’re onto something, because references to the Grimms’ stories are strewn throughout the novel. Eve describes her cottage as ‘something out of dark fairy tale,’ and muses that the Hygates’ child might as well be a prince or a princess.’ There are doors she is not supposed to open, and a lot of midnight sewing, which isn’t quite spinning gold from straw – but once there’s a direct quote from the Brothers Grimm’s Rumpelstiltskin, some more pieces fall into place. (Depending on the translation, even the book’s title could be a reference to Rumpelstiltskin’s song and dance about the secrecy of its true name.)

Eve’s willingness to follow the twists of her story might thus also reveal a fair dash of the fairy tale logic of old: that sometimes a young woman might just find herself in a position where she has to give up her baby, and then show courage and resilience to win it back.

Most of the characters in Carlyle’s book operate on this logic, too: archetypes that are good, or evil, and sometimes a little conflicted but never with as much nuance necessary to make a reader feel for them. But that is not what they are there for: just as Eve fits her job as thriller/fairy tale heroine perfectly, everyone else clicks into place to drive the twists of the skilfully plotted rollercoaster. No One Will Know entertains with its lavish and memorable set pieces, the mysteries hidden inside mansions and lonely lighthouses, and its ability to baffle the reader.