Rebecca Keller Seeks Justice and Revenge in Assisted Living in 'You Should Have Known.'

Award-winning writer and internationally exhibited artist, Rebecca A. Keller, visits us to share her exciting debut novel, You Should Have Known. In this mystery thriller, 72-year-old retired nurse Frannie Green is grieving the loss of her granddaughter, Bethany, and has recently moved into an assisted living facility after injuring her knee. While there, she befriends her neighbor, Katherine, who Frannie later learns is the wife of the corrupt judge that tried the case of the drunk driver who killed Bethany. Filled with vengeance, Frannie takes matters into her own hands as she seeks justice for her beloved granddaughter. Concerning the genre, Keller said, “It’s not a typical mystery in that there’s a dead body in the first page… it’s not that kind of book. It’s kind of literary. There’s a lot of attention to character and language. So, it doesn’t easily slat. So I think, it’s finding an audience with people who are interested in mysteries, interested in work about women and women’s lives and the totality of women’s lives. I think it’s a great book for book clubs. I don’t know exactly what book club fiction is but I think this is it.”

While it may seem as if creating a 72-year-old protagonist is unconventional, Keller needed someone who was elderly and also knowledgeable about medicine. She remarked, “I wanted to write a morally complicated character and I was interested in the idea of somebody who just has had to swallow the mundane injustices of the world, as we all do, and gets to a certain point [and] just says, you know, she acts on perhaps her worst impulse but it’s informed by a fundamental anger at people in power getting away with stuff, especially in the case of… the villain in this book, who kind of pose as these morally upright people full of rectitude and, sort of, pomposity, but never really stop to examine the wider repercussions of their actions. It struck me wanting to have somebody who might step outside this straight and narrow… I had to make her alive on the page and also make it believable that she would do this and having done it, make it still forgivable, that you’re still in her corner… they also have to be less fearful of consequences… the situation of older people in this culture, they’re kind of invisible… so Frannie realizes that in that invisibility… there’s freedom, and also Frannie’s like, ‘I’m not likely to get caught because who’s going to look at me? Who’s going to suspect me?’ …in some ways, the stakes are different for her.”