The Bottom Line: A powerful psychological thriller about two sisters unearthing long-buried family secrets.
Getting It Right: A Psychological Thriller opens at a funeral, where thirty-year-old Kara Lawrence watches the burial of Jim Smyth, the foster father who sexually abused her as a child. She has come with Tuesday and Flyer, the foster siblings who survived the same household, hoping Smyth’s death will finally put the past to rest. Instead, Kara remains haunted by memories and increasingly convinced that someone is following her.Â
Meanwhile, in affluent Westchester County, Alex Lawrence rushes to the hospital after her powerful attorney father, Worth, suffers a serious heart attack. His urgent request is a shock: find Kara, the half-sister he abandoned as a child.
Alex and Kara share a father and briefly crossed paths as children, but they have grown up in completely different worlds. Naturally, Alex soon discovers that finding Kara is no simple reunion mission. The family’s version of what happened contains troubling gaps, and every answer raises new questions about Worth, his marriage, and the decisions that left one daughter protected by wealth while the other entered foster care.
Author Karen E. Osborne deftly turns a family mystery into a broader psychological thriller in which Kara has good reason to question nearly everyone around her. Fans of Osborne’s stellar back catalog will recognize one of her hallmarks immediately: making past trauma an active force without allowing it to overwhelm the plot or degrade the suspense. Osborne’s earlier novels have repeatedly paired present-day danger with wounds that refuse to remain in the past. Tangled Lies used a brutal murder to expose family secrets and questions of racial identity. Justice for Emerson joined crime with issues of loyalty, morality and race. Reckonings made long-buried sexual trauma inseparable from the heroine’s present life. In Getting It Right, Osborne creates an especially intimate story of abandonment, sisterhood and trust. What feels distinctive is the dual focus on Kara and Alex, whose very different lives allow Osborne to examine not only how trauma endures but also how the same family history can wound people in entirely different ways.
The supporting cast gives the novel both warmth and additional tension. Tuesday and Flyer are family in every meaningful sense, yet each has survived their shared childhood differently. Mrs. E., Kara’s formidable landlady, presides over a Harlem brownstone that provides the safety Kara never had growing up, while police officer Danny Waters offers a very different kind of attention from Zach, the married businessman Kara is dating.
Osborne delivers a particularly effective reversal when the stranger shadowing Kara turns out to represent a very different kind of danger than she imagined, transforming the earlier stalking scenes and widening the novel into crime-thriller territory. Meanwhile, Alex’s investigation produces a quieter but equally consequential turn as Worth’s reassuring version of Kara’s childhood begins to unravel, forcing his daughter to reconsider both the family story and the father who told it.
As the sisters’ stories move closer together, Osborne keeps widening the stakes. Alex’s search exposes increasingly uncomfortable truths about the Lawrence family, while Kara’s involvement with Zach grows more dangerous and attracts federal scrutiny. It’s a recipe for a satisfying blend of psychological suspense with substantial family drama, and the novel has something to say about how hard it is to reclaim a life shaped by someone else’s choices.
New and old Osborne fans will agree that she, indeed, got this one right.
