You Shouldn't Have Come Here

Like many “locked room” mysteries, You Shouldn’t Have Come Here establishes a cast of potential suspects, even though there is no clear crime at stake until Calvin attacks Grace in Chapter 48. Jeneva Rose maintains an ominous tone by describing characters’ conflicts and relationships. Beyond her two first-person narrators, Rose introduces other Wyoming residents over the course of the novel. Charlotte, who is desperately in love with Calvin, shows a willingness to do or say whatever she must to drive Grace out of Wyoming. Charlotte’s ex-husband Wyatt, a deputy and lifelong friend of Calvin and Joe, picks fights with both brothers when he finds out they had flings with Charlotte. Joe, who spent six months in prison for Calvin’s murder of former girlfriend Lisa, resents his older brother for being favored by their deceased parents. As if in retaliation, a drunken Joe conceals but later reveals their parents’ murder-suicide. Betty, Calvin’s overprotective surrogate mother, secretly stops taking medication and Albert, an Airbnb guest, is later revealed to be Calvin and Joe’s uncle. Albert confesses to having secrets or “demons” (208), one of them possibly being complicity in Calvin’s murders.

The characters with the deadliest secrets, however, are the two first-person narrators—whose personable voices conceal their true selves.