More Than You'll Ever Know: A Novel

As More Than You'll Ever Know opens in 2017, Cassie Bowman is trying to eke out a living as a true crime writer. Growing up in Enid, Oklahoma, she watched "Dateline" with her mother and checked true crime books out of the library, reading In Cold Blood and Helter Skelter at an early age. By the time she was in high school, she was obsessed -- determined to become a journalist and write the kind of books she grew up reading. "Books that looked at the ugliest parts of humanity and asked: How did it come to this?" So far, she works fifteen hours per week earning thirteen dollars per hour writing blog posts for a television network that broadcasts low-budget true crime productions. It is Cassie's job to find novel, gruesome crimes and write posts about them for an insatiable audience. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her fiancé, Duke, who owns and operates a food truck, and encourages Cassie to pursue freelance work on other topics because he finds true crime "macabre." Cassie is tiring of her pursuits, feeling "like a forager of other people's tragedies, . . ." she relates in the first-person narrative through which Gutierrez tells her story. "It was hard to be proud of this kind of work." Duke grew up on a dairy farm with a large, loving family whose members have embraced Cassie and are eager to help plan and host their upcoming wedding. Cassie has never told Duke the truth about her own family, which is why she can never take calls from her younger brother, Andrew, in his presence. "There was too much he didn't know. Too much to risk by telling him."

A Google alert leads Cassie to a story in the Laredo Morning Times about Dolores and Fabian Rivera, and Cassie is drawn to the accompanying photographs. One, taken in 1978, shows the couple with their twin boys, Gabriel and Mateo, and was taken at a ribbon-cutting event. The second photo is of Dolores standing next to Andres Russo with her hand on the shoulder of a teenage girl, and was taken in 1984. The article reveals that Dolores was the girl's stepmother, and Penelope Russo painfully recollects being deceoved by Dolores. The headline? "Her Secret LIves: How One Woman's Double Marriage Led to the Murder of an Innocent Man." Cassie is hooked. "I had to know more." Pondering the sheer effort is would take to lead a double life, Cassie has to know why Dolores -- a mother -- would do such a thing. Her interest is in no small part fueled, as Gutierrez details incrementally, by her own family history. Cassie's mother, a third grade teacher, died tragically just as Andrew came into Cassie's life. The fact that Dolores refused to participate in an interview for the article does not deter Cassie. She begins researching the case, intent on finding out how Andres Russo ended up dead on August 2, 1986, after being involved with Dolores for three years and married to her for nearly a year. And why Fabian murdered him and is still incarcerated for the crime. She soon learns that Mateo owns a veterinary clinic in San Antonio and Gabriel is a high school basketball coach. And Dolores is still in their lives, plainly visible in family photographs posted on Facebook and Instagram. Cassie is flabbergasted at the notion that her sons were able to forgive Dolores . . . because Cassie has never been able to forgive her own mother.

In alternating chapters, Dolores's story unfolds via a third-person narrative that begins in 1983 as she -- "Lore" -- commences another business trip to Mexico City. She loves being able to travel to the large city. "Nobody knows her. She could be anyone. She could become anyone." Indeed. Gutierrez says Lore's story had to be set in the past because today so much information is readily available online. Additionally, it "created the opportunity to explore truth in a different way -- what if the events known to have happened didn’t actually happen that way, or what if there was a deeper story behind them?" Lore meets Andres during a recession when she and Fabian are extremely stressed because Fabian is desperately trying to keep his business afloat even as the peso's devaluation continues. Lore's job in international banking is secure, but Lore opened a store selling custom doors five years earlier. With people struggling just to hold onto their homes, and constuction and remodeling projects stalled, the market for doors has shrunk dramatically. The pressure is impacting their marriage. Gutierrez, who grew up in Laredo, "a border town," depicts Fabian's intense pain and disappointment about failing for the first time. Even though it is not his fault, "in Mexican culture, there’s that element of machismo, and expectation that men will be the providers." If Fabian's store goes out of business, Lore will be the primary breadwinner. Meanwhile, her parents are experiencing the same consternation about their own business, and Lore and her siblings learn her parents have made horrendous choices, leading them to need financial assistance from their grown children in order to survive.

Mexico City provides Lore a respite from her responsibilities. She is invited to the wedding of the daughter of a Mexican entrepreneur and bank customer. It's an excellent opportunity to network, and it is at the reception dinner that she meets Andres -- the bride's professor and advisor at the university. Lore is a beautiful thirty-two-year-old woman and the way Andres looks at her is electrifying. She does not tell him that she is married and has two sons at home. "And it's only a dance, after all."

Cassie's pursuit of her story unfolds as, in alternating and thoroughly grossing chapters, Lore and Andres fall in love in 1983, and Lore's deception has escalating consequences. Her frequent business trips make it possible for her to spend time with Andres, who teaches and parents his daughter. Lore actively conceals the truth about her life from Andres, arranging to receive his telephone calls at the bank at specified times, for instance. When Andres asks her if she wants childen, she tells him, "I'm not sure," conflating the inquiry in her mind to "Do you want more children?" so that she can delude herself into believing that she is being honest. Her relationship with Andres is exciting -- romantic and dangerous -- and something that Lore possesses just for herself. Gutierrez convinclingly and compassionately portrays Lore as a woman who truly loves Fabian and her children, but for whom her life with them is not enough -- it's both too confining and requires too much of her. Even motherhood did not fulfill Lore. "Motherhood is supposed to be quiet and pretty. But motherhood is not pretty. Motherhood has teeth." She went back to work over Fabian's objections. Gutierrez also draws readers into Fabian's plight. Back at home in Laredo, striving to provide for his family, he has no idea that his wife's business trips are actually trysts.

Cassie locates Lore, who agrees to be interviewed but not about the murder of Andres. Cassie also speaks with Lore's sons, Penelope, and others who can provide background and context to the story she plans to write. With Lore, Gutierrez strove to create "a character who is acting in an ostensibly amoral way and portray her in a way that very quickly makes her actions understandable." She succeeds. Like Cassie, readers are drawn to Lore, realting to and empathizing with her desires and dreams. Like Lore, Cassie is passionate and driven. Her ambition connected her with the woman to whom she reveals details about her own family history that she has never been able to tell Duke, blurring the line that separates her professional pursuit of the truth with her personal needs. Lore cleverly turns the tables on Cassie, drawing information from her as they spend hours talking. As her work on the story continues, Cassie's perspective on her own family evolves as her relationship with Duke begins to falter, particularly when Andrew needs her help and Duke becomes privvy to the aspects of Cassie's past she hid from him.

Once Lore's story advances to 2017, it becomes a carefully curated first-person account that seems mostly straight-forward and honest, but it is always clear that to see Lore as a victim is a mistake. She manipulates Cassie, telling her just enough to satisfy her, but not everything. And there are several junctures at which Cassie discovers that she has been fooled by Lore, who agreed to participate in the intervews for her own purpose, as Gutierrez skillfully reveals gradually. Is it a performance for Lore or is she a sixty-seven-year-old woman with regrets who has spent many years trying to right the wrongs she committed? She acknowledges that she loves reliving that period in her life. "And the truth is, I had always been a hedonist. A slave to the pleasures of the moment. Wasn't that how everything had started? Because, in a time of deprivation, Andres had given me his hand? How could I have said no? To the dance, to the wine?"

Cassie's investigation reveals inconsistencies in the details related by witnesses during police interviews and the evidence uncovered during the criminal investigation. Cassie comes to believe that the wrong person is serving time for killing Andres. But if Fabian did not kill him, who did? Is Fabian covering for someone? The book's pace accelerates as Cassie closes in on the truth and finds herself in danger. But Gutierrez delivers more than just a murder mystery. She also examines, through Cassie's conflict with Duke, the -- perhaps unintended -- consequences of true crime stories. Despite her agreement with Lore not to discuss the murder, Cassie cannot ignore her misgivings about Fabian's conviction, even though he confessed to killing Andres. Cassies tries to convince Duke that revealing the truth is a means of honoring the decedent, "a way of saying their life mattered." But Duke reminds her that she only has Lore's permission to write about her double life. She has not obtained permission from anyone else connected to Lore or Andres's death to write about it, and her unwilingness to respect boundaries has the potential to bring about devastating results. She envisions uncovering the truth as a duty. But the truth always comes at a cost, as Gutierrez deftly demonstrates.

More Than You'll Ever Know is a inventive meditation on the demands of marriage and motherhood, the sacrifices they require from women, and the way society views women who refuse to settle for less than they want and feel they deserve. It is also an absorbing look at ambition and the power of investigative journalism, as well as forgiveness. Is there any action that is truly unforgivable? Or is the capacity for undertanding and empathy so vast that the most unimaginably hurtful betrayal can be forgiven in order to preserve one's family?

But at the core of the story is that nagging question: Why? Why did Lore risk the family she had already created with Fabian in order to pursue a new one with Andres? Did she really think that she could get away with it? Didn't she understand that it was a catastrophe waiting to unfold and that when her duplicity was revealed, the people she loved would be devastated by her betrayal? Lore tells Cassie, I wasnted to be known. I wanted to know myself. That's what it was all about. And I ended up alone." Is Lore's explanation worthy of belief? And in the end, is Cassie's dogged pursuit of the truth worth what it costs her? Finding out the answers to those questions, and pondering the issues Gutierrez broaches in More Than You'll Ever Know is a delightfully entertaining and engrossing experience. More Than You'll Ever Know is so tautly crafted, her characters so fully developed and fascinating, it is hard to believe it is a debut work of fiction.

Thanks to NetGalley for an Advance Reader's Copy of the book.

My first read of this genre in quite some time. Not one to reread but certainly enjoyable! Enjoyed the characters, suspense, writing and Spanglish. Looking forward to another read by this author.

Supreme secrets and lies. This will hold your attention and wrap you around the characters.

Keeps you interested and keeps you wanting to read

I loved this story. Lore’s longing to feel like more than a mother is totally understandable. The fact she was able to carry on with two husbands for years is kind of insane. Cassie was a little annoying, but she was portrayed as a competent researcher and writer. There were a few twists toward the end that got me.