as time goes by

Every year on May 1, the lives of Quinn Riley and Jules Delaney change. It started when they were in high school, back in 1992. In their little town of Monarch, Nebraska, not much happens. But every young woman in small Nebraska towns know that it’s on May 1 that he strikes. The newspapers call him The May Day Killer, but the name is not perfect. He doesn’t always kill. Sometimes he just assaults them and lets them go. He calls them “the lucky ones.”

But in 1992, there is a big concert in Omaha, and Jules is going with her boyfriend and best friend. Riley is going also, but only because his mother and uncle surprised him with a ticket for his birthday. But it’s at the concert that Jules finds out her boyfriend and best friend slept together, and she left. Trying to get home alone from Omaha made her a target. But she was one of the lucky ones and survived. He did take her driver’s license though, and he threatened to hurt her family if she didn’t stay quiet.

Riley ended up getting into a fight after the concert. He threw only one punch, but the way the other kid went down and cracked his head caused far more damage than Riley imagined. He ended up in juvenile detention. He did manage to get his GED while he was locked up, but his mother was murdered and his brother, who had developmental disabilities, was put into a group home. He decides his best option at that point is to join the Army.

As the years go by, May 1 is an important day in both their lives. It’s Riley’s birthday, and Jules came to think of it as her “death day.” Each anniversary of that day brings memories and challenges, secrets and pain, trauma and, eventually, opportunities.

Jules wants to find the monster who assaulted her and several other women she became friends with over the years. Riley wants to find the person who murdered his mother. As the years go by, they find themselves in the same places. Their lives start to intertwine. They were once friends chatting in study hall about a band. But as these anniversaries stack up and they both try to find ways to deal with their individual pain, they find that the secrets that have kept them both apart from the people in their lives might overlap in surprising ways.

The Anniversary is the latest thriller by Alex Finlay, and it is phenomenal. I hadn’t read any of his other books, and at the end of this story, I couldn’t help but wonder why I had waited so long. His writing is masterful. The way the stories of these two characters wove together was lovely and surprising and creative.

I grew up in Nebraska in the 1980s, so the setting made it more impactful for me because the places and restaurants and Midwestern aesthetic really hit me hard. The Anniversary starts in the 1990s, so I had moved away around the time this story starts, but the events that come up through this novel still pinged my brain. There were references to grunge music, Friends, Monica Lewinsky, the beer commercial with the frogs, and so many more. It kept me grounded in those years and made me smile remembering where I was at those points in pop culture history.

I listened to The Anniversary as an audio book, narrated by Ari Fliakos and Brittany Pressley. They took turns with the voices of Quinn and Jules, and they both did a phenomenal job. The narration worked beautifully for these characters, and both narrators were able to age these characters slowly over time, so they sounded like high schoolers at the beginning and seasoned adults at the end. Only ten years go by, but some of those were very difficult years, so these characters gained wisdom and experience beyond their years over that time, and the narration reflected that beautifully.

I was genuinely surprised by The Anniversary. I read a lot of thrillers, so I can usually get a feel for how things are going to end up. I am always impressed by writers who can surprise me, and Finlay did. Actually, he shocked me with that ending, even though it was right there in front of me the whole time. I loved this book, and now I definitely need to go back and read the books I’ve missed.

Egalleys for The Anniversary were provided by Minotaur Books, and an early copy of the audio book was provided by Macmillan Audio, both through NetGalley, with many thanks, but the opinions are mine.