The premise of “Little Threats,” the powerful new novel from Emily Schultz, reads with the clarity and promise of a quality true crime podcast — and I mean that as the highest of praise.
On July 5, 1993, the body of sixteen-year-old Haley Kimberson is found in a wooded area near a prosperous suburb of Richmond, Virginia, “an Ophelia in Doc Martens.” One of her best friends, Kennedy Wynn, pleads guilty to the crime, although she remembers nothing of the events of that night. Kennedy, also sixteen, is sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
“Little Threats” begins with Kennedy’s release from prison in 2008. Her twin sister Carter has estranged herself from Kennedy, the girls’ mother has died, and their father is a shattered shell of his former self. Adding to Kennedy’s difficulty in acclimating to her new world is the reappearance of figures from her past. There’s the college boy who had been involved with both her and Haley (and whose testimony regarding the murder was one of the factors in Kennedy accepting the guilty plea), as well as Haley’s younger brother and her mother, both tortured by Haley’s death. There is also a television true crime series, “Crime After Crime,” re-investigating the murder, attempting to contact all the principals to answer lingering doubts and questions.
Casting a shadow over everything, however, is a simple fact: Kennedy still doesn’t remember anything about Haley’s death except finding her friend’s body, but she is convinced she didn’t kill her. Which means there is still a murderer free, and secrets to conceal.
While she was born in the United States, Schultz grew up in Canada, after her father “decided he preferred Canada to Vietnam.” Her early books, including “Black Coffee Blues,” a Danuta Gleed Prize-nominated collection of short stories, took a decidedly literary bent, and her first novel, “Joyland,” shares its name with the online literary magazine she co-founded in 2008. Her 2015 novel, “The Blondes,” was a marked departure, a thriller in which a rage virus spreads among blonde women. Schultz brings both sensibilities — the literary and the thriller — to “Little Threats.”
While it is a masterful slow-boil, with a palpable sense of menace suffusing nearly every scene, it is also a stark and realistic depiction of the traumatic legacy of violent crime and tragedy. Running throughout is a breathtaking evocation of the early 1990s (the suicide of Kurt Cobain and Madonna’s coffee table erotica volume “Sex” both play roles in the narrative, among many other touchstones) and a powerful, conflicting female coming-of-age story.
Key to the book’s success, at every level, is Schultz’ skill with characterization. Her use of multiple narrative perspectives allows keen insight not only into Kennedy, Carter and their father, but of more peripheral characters. Each is powerfully drawn, complicated and conflicted, each harbouring the sort of secrets that might have claimed a young girl’s life, secrets that may claim yet more victims fifteen years later.
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