Review: Promise Not To Tell by Jennifer McMahon

• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks (April 10, 2007)
• ISBN-10: 9780061143311
• Source: Publisher

“One potato, two potato, three potato four

She used to live here long ago

She doesn’t anymore”

Forty-one year old Kate has returned to her small Vermont hometown to tend to her mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s. The very night she arrives, a young girl is horrifically killed in a manner similar to one that took place three decades earlier.

Del Griswold was a poor, skinny girl referred by her classmates as “Potato Girl” due the crops her family sold.

“There isn’t a soul in town who hasn’t heard of the Potato Girl, though.  She is, by all accounts, the most famous resident of New Canaan–which is funny because, back when she was alive, she was just a skinny kid with scabby knees who, you could tell just by looking, would never amount to much.

How wrong we all were.”

Del was brutally killed the last day of fifth grade.  Her murderer was never found.  Kate was Del’s friend, but never admitted as such to her classmates.  In the last hours of her life, Del was shunned by those close to her.  Now an urban myth claims that she isn’t really gone, she comes back to seek revenge on those who were cruel to her so long ago.

“It’s like a potato: you cut it up into pieces, bury any of those pieces-even  a little bit of peel if it has eyes-and another plant grows.”

 

Kate’s past begins to rear it’s ugly head & make itself known in the present. The police begin to question her relationship with Del in an attempt to understand the most recent crime.  The uncanny similarities lead them to believe that Kate is somehow responsible; it was only after her return that things started going very wrong.

As she tries to deal with her dementia-ridden mother, Kate begins to wonder just how much her mother really knows about what happened all those years ago.  When secrets kept hidden are forced to be revealed, it is apparent that Del’s murder is related to the most recent crime. Can Kate & those from her past put an end to the strange happenings in this small, quiet, Vermont town? Can the Potato Girl finally rest in peace? A phrase Kate heard from a patient years ago comes back: The dead can blame.