One of Us Knows is the second novel that I have read by Alyssa Cole. The first was When No One is Watching, which I read before I started this blog. Both novels explore the horrors of racism. When No One is Watching is about the sinister gentrification of a Brooklyn neighbourhood. I liked it enough that I wanted to read Cole’s next thriller, One of Us Knows, but I somehow missed in the synopsis that the protagonist has dissociative identity disorder (DID – formerly known as multiple personality disorder), which almost stopped me from reading it as I feel that DID is a sensitive subject matter that not many people take seriously. However, my curiosity won out and I ended up being completely engrossed by this novel.

One of Us Knows opens with a Black woman named Kenetria (aka Ken) awakening to find herself on a dock waiting for a ferry to take her to her new job as a caretaker of a historical home on an isolated island on the Hudson River. Ken has been dormant for six years, so she knows nothing about the job she is about to start as one of her other headmates applied for it and left her with no information about it. Ken is also surprised to discover life is nothing like it was before she went dormant: the world has been changed by the COVID pandemic and she is homeless with no money. She needs this caretaker job to survive, so she is determined not to ruin things for herself and her headmates, even though she is known for majorly messing things up when she is fronting (ie. in control of their body).

As the ferry takes Ken closer to Grace Castle on Kavanaugh Island, Ken and her headmates are surprised to discover that Grace Castle looks exactly like the castle they reside in in their inner world when they are certain they have never even heard of Grace Castle, let one been there before. After their first night on the island, the members of the board of trustees for the Castle’s conservation trust, a group of white men, unexpectedly show up just as a dangerous storm bears down on the island. One of them is the man Ken assaulted before she went dormant, begging the question of how she even got the caretaker job in the first place.

While Ken and her headmates try to figure out how they ended up on Kavanaugh Island, things are falling apart in their inner world. Headmates are disappearing, and the ones still left are wondering if Ken has something to do with their disappearance. I cannot speak to how authentically DID is portrayed in One of Us Knows, but I found Cole to be respectful in her depiction of DID. Ken and her headmates are all well developed characters and how they coexist in one body is interesting.

The overlapping mysteries in the outer and inner worlds had me hypothesizing in overdrive and racing through One of Us Knows to see if I was right. The novel takes a rather unexpected turn towards the end, which on the face of it seems extreme, but honestly the horrors that men are capable of inflicting on women and that white men inflict on people of colour does not surprise me anymore. One of Us Knows is still a suspenseful read and thankfully does not have a stupid ending.