Tell Me What You Did: A Novel

“A unique, intelligent, original story . . .”

When True Crime podcaster Poe Webb was 13 years old, she witnessed the murder of her mother. Now she and her producer/ boyfriend Kip invite the public to come on her show and confess their crimes. She can’t absolve them of their sins, and she can’t protect them from the law, but she can promise to give them time and space to talk and to explain what drove them to do what they did.

Poe has no knowledge of the caller’s crime nor the caller’s name until they tell her during the podcast. Most of the time the caller gives a phony name.

“. . .  Some of them feel massive relief confessing their crimes on a national platform . . . One time I had a guy in his fifties who confessed to poisoning his spouse, upset that his ‘trophy wife had grown into a consolation prize,’ . . .  And my guests know the more they reveal about themselves, the better the episode.”

On a podcast, viewer numbers rule.

Her show provides anonymity and instant fame to her guests, but what neither Poe’s audience nor her producer know is that Poe is hiding her own years old crime. Kip thinks her mother died in a car accident.

“He doesn’t know what happened to my mother, much less what I did about it.”

One day a man calls the show saying his name is Ian Hindley.

Right about here readers who are also true crime buffs will immediately be put in mind of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, the depraved killers in the real-life Moors Murders that took place in England back in the 1960s.

The caller eventually admits Ian Hindley is not his real name and confirms it when he tells her: “I killed your mother.”

But Poe knows this can’t be true, because her mother’s killer is dead. It’s a secret she’s kept from everyone, but realizes the whole world will know when, to her horror, the caller insists on trading places insisting she be interviewed live on her own podcast.

She isn’t sure Hindley is really her mother’s killer, but he seems to know things about the murder that only someone who was there would know.

“I have only seconds to weigh the risks. Even if he’s a Hutchins imposter, if I don’t have him on the show, he might be psychotic enough to come for me. And my father.

“I send him a one-word answer.

“’Okay.’

“I think that’s it—conversation done. But a couple of minutes later, Hindley sends one final message.

“’I know what you did in New York.’”

“. . . .  I stare at the screen, every muscle in my body tensed.

“No, no, no, no, no.”

Tension ramps up over the days before the live stream is scheduled. Poe decides to confess to her father before the podcast streams, and he tells her that not only did her mother have an affair before she was murdered, but her father did as well. All this information further muddies Poe’s memories of the past.

In the Conversation With the Author at the end of the book, author Carter Wilson talks about some of the challenges he faced while writing this book.

He wanted to be sure to make Poe a sympathetic character. She’s a hard-talking, hard-drinking vigilante, and though he didn’t need readers to like her, he wanted readers to at least care about what happened to her. Also, because Poe was in a constant battle between seeking justice and keeping her secret, he had to make sure he didn’t steer her too much in one direction or the other.

Wilson said he tends to only write morally gray characters. He loved writing Poe, because as a flawed character himself (though not a murderer!) he would think about what he would do in her situation as the story progressed.

Tell Me What You Did is a unique, intelligent, original story.