Jamie Henry’s crazy sister Cate is coming home.

She’s spent the last two years behind bars for starting a fire at a barn that not only killed horses, but it severely harmed one of the local girls. Everyone suspects she did it because she didn’t want that girl to be involved with the boy she had a crush on.

But what worries Jamie isn’t just that she’s coming home (and really, she’s 19, she legally doesn’t need to “come home”). It’s that Cate is coming back to see him.

Because Cate has to set the record straight with her brother.

Stephanie Kuehn’s Complicit is a dark psychological thriller that takes everything she did so well in Charm & Strange and amps it up even more. Be warned that everything from here on out is spoiler.

The first thing you should know about Kuehn’s novel is that you know pretty quickly that things aren’t what they seem. That Jamie, our narrator, isn’t reliable. More than that, you know what he’s said about Cate and her connection to the barn fire might not be true. Perhaps you don’t know how it’s not true, but you know that it’s not. So don’t go into the book thinking that it’s a mystery — it’s not.

Jamie and Cate are adopted. The two of them grew up under Angie and Malcolm’s roof, where they live a pretty nice life. Their adoptive parents are wealthy, and the two of them have had every luxury available to them. The problem is that both of them are damaged from what happened before the adoption. Their mother, who was very young when she had Cate and not much older when she had Jamie, wasn’t the world’s most stable person herself. She was a bit of a drifter, did drugs, never had much money. Even though Jamie and Cate are siblings, they’re not necessarily whole siblings; that’s not known entirely, though. Their mother doesn’t know who either of their fathers are, but the differences in their skin colors suggests that they don’t share the same father. Cate’s darker than Jamie.

They came to be adopted when their mother was killed at home by a gun shot. Angie and Malcolm came to adopt the siblings because they themselves had lost two children in a tragic accident and Cate and Jamie fit well enough into the holes of their deceased kids.

Both Cate and Jamie went to therapy because of the grief and trauma sustained in their early lives. Cate didn’t take to the therapist in the same way Jamie did, and Jamie is upright in talking about how much his life has been impacted by Dr. Waverly. She’s taught him methods of coping with his feelings, ones which can be diagnosed and those which can’t be.

Two years ago, the day things came to light about Cate and the fire at the barn, Jamie began having awful problems with his hands. They stopped working.

Hearing that she was coming home — coming for him — made his hands stop working again.

Complicit is told in the present, as well as through flashbacks to the years prior to Cate’s incarceration. Bit by bit, we’re given flashes into the experiences Jamie had as an adoptee, as well as his experiences learning to make friends and control his emotional and mental states. It’s tough though, especially knowing Cate’s after him. And she’s after him. She knows where he’s at. She knows he’s settling into a new relationship with a girl named Jenny. She knows that he needs to be talked to.

But in every moment where Cate approaches Jamie and where it seems as though she’s finally going to get the chance to tell him what it is she needs to say, he passes out. This is beyond the hands not working. This is not knowing where he is or what he’s doing and waking up unaware of what’s happened except knowing that Cate had been there.

It’s a defense mechanism.

Throughout the book, Jamie leads readers to believe that Cate needs to be avoided. That she’s the embodiment of evil, of terrible decisions, of making poor choices that have forever impacted the family. The truth, though, isn’t at all that simple.

Cate is not the bad seed.

Kuehn deftly weaves Jamie’s reality against the reality of the world around him, and they don’t match up. Those rifts are where the light shines into the story, and in many ways, it’s Cate who digs her fingers into that rift and tears it open. Jamie distracts us though and he does so very well. He recalls something about the night with the barn fire. He was there. He was there to bury the evidence of his sister’s wrongdoing. She’d borrowed his backpack, and when he saw it there that night, he grabbed it and buried it. He didn’t want her to get in trouble and he wanted to do what it was he could to protect her. Except there was no need to protect her.

He was protecting himself.

The fire that night and the fires and burglaries happening around town now had nothing to do with Cate and everything to do with Jamie. The death of their mother years ago had nothing to do with some botched drug deal nor any other theory Jamie cooked up and presented to himself (and by extension, us). It was Jamie.

Complicit is a story about mental illness and about how sick someone can become mentally. It’s about how far other people will go to protect those they love who can’t be helped in the ways that they want to be helped. Kuehn offers us some words for what Jamie’s experiencing, except through the eyes of Jamie, those diagnoses don’t matter. What matters is that as readers, we’re actually experiencing the illness right along with Jamie. We know almost immediately he’s unreliable, and because of his defense mechanisms — his hands not working, his ability to black out and not face the emotions and thoughts in front of him — we’re also left in the dark about some of what’s going on in the present. But rather than being frustrating, it’s a brilliant mimicking of exactly what’s happening at that moment. We are right there with Jamie believing that Cate is a terrible, dark person, and we are right there with Jamie in his desperate search for understanding what happened to his mother, and we are right there with Jamie as he begins falling head over heels for Jenny. As the light breaks through though, we see why we should be worried about being there for him in each of those instances. When Cate reveals herself as not the “crazy” girl we’ve been led to believe she is, suddenly everything falls perfectly into place about the rest of the story. And yes, we do have to worry tremendously about the positive, fulfilling relationship Jamie’s beginning with Jenny.

The threads of this story are woven together seamlessly. We know there’s something going on, and we develop theories about them, but the what of it is never the point of the story. Instead, the point is the experience itself. What does it look like to be so mentally ill you don’t know right from wrong? What does it feel like to be so sick that no amount of help can truly help you? Kuehn forces some really fascinating questions, too, about culpability, about guilt, and about shame in the story too. Why doesn’t Jamie feel bad about the fire? How has he managed to block out shooting and killing his mother (which was accidental, probably, and for which he never took the fall nor the guilt)? What happens when those who love you do everything to protect you?

There are very smart allusions and layers built into the story, as well. Cate is a very smart girl, even though we don’t get to see much of her on page, and what we do see of her is filtered through Jamie’s perception. Complicit will appeal to readers who love psychological thrillers, and it’s fast paced and engaging immediately. It will also appeal to readers who want a novel that forces them to reread, picking up new clues through the second and third readers. What does “The Owl and the Pussycat” really imply here? What about the books Cate has given Jamie? What about the Richard Wright novel? And, perhaps the thing that really cemented this as not just a good novel, but a GREAT one for me, what about that ending? It’s not just a literal taking of the fall, but the burning of that photo which caused the fall. That was what made it clear to me just how sick Jamie was, and it made me want to turn back to page one and see where else those clear signs emerged that I missed the first time through. Without doubt, Kuehn’s expertise in psychology only aids in crafting this story and informs not just Jamie’s worldview, but also ours as readers.

Complicit leaves the reader with big questions, despite offering answers to the questions raised in the story itself. It’s unsettling in many ways, but that discomfort is exactly what readers should walk away with. There’s not a happy ending here, and it’s possible to take aways here are scarier than they are comforting. This book will appeal to readers who want a story that hooks them immediately, and it’ll appeal equally to readers who want a story that is going to challenge them. It’s a sharp, contemporary/realistic thriller that delivers on every level, and Jamie’s voice is memorable, haunting, and authentic.

Kuehn is an author to keep your eye on. She’s only getting better.

Complicit will be available June 24 from St. Martin’s Press. Review copy received from the publisher.