Book Review: You Can Trust Me by Wendy Heard

For the last few years, it’s been Summer and Leo against the world. Summer has been a grifter since she was a child, out of a need to look after both herself and her infuriatingly irresponsible hippie mother. Leo, on the other hand, ran away from home as a teenager after tragedy hollowed out her once normal, loving family:

I’d realized that everything my parents had worked so hard for–stability, family–was bullshit. There was no safety in this world, no permanence. Family could be snatched from you overnight as easily as losing jewelry in a swimming pool.

 

When we got the news, I left my house at two o’clock in the morning, walking through the dark streets alone. I should have been terrified to leave the house, but no. It worked the opposite. I’d realized that nowhere was safe, and that my days on this earth were numbered whether I did everything right or wrong.

Thus Leo is living on the streets and barely managing to survive when Summer first comes across her. Taking pity on the spunky young woman, Summer cleans her up and gives her a place to stay. In Summer, Leo finds a substitute for the big sister she’s still grieving. Soon the pair are inseparable, traveling up and down the California coast and surviving by relieving rich people of their extra cash and valuables. Summer specializes in quick thievery, lifting wallets in crowded clubs. Leo prefers longer quasi-cons, finding rich men and milking them for all they’re worth before moving on to the next town.

Their latest mark is billionaire clean energy entrepreneur Michael Forrester, after he serendipitously likes one of Leo’s Instagram selfies. After “accidentally” meeting, Leo is surprised to discover that he’s actually pretty hot and charming in person. At the very least, she’s relieved that she won’t have to fake an attraction to him as she positions herself to receive the gifts that will help her and Summer see out another few months or more.

But after an overnight date with Michael, Leo disappears. Summer tries not to worry, but as time passes with no word from Leo, her fears increase. It’s not like she can go to the police and explain that her best friend vanished during the execution of a con. Worse still is the niggling doubt that maybe Leo just left her behind for better things. It doesn’t help that Leo had recently been talking about traveling beyond California and even the United States, something that undocumented Summer simply can’t do. 

So Summer decides to take matters into her own hands. Posing as the girlfriend of one of Michael’s tech executives, she cons her way onto his private island during an exclusive investor’s weekend. The deeper she digs, the more she discovers, not only about what happened to Leo, but about the truths she’d still rather not face herself. As the bored wife of another executive whom she tentatively opens up to points out to her:

“It’s always like that. There’s always one friend who cares more, who tries harder. That’s why female friendships are doomed. Eventually she’ll get tired of you mothering her and you’ll get sick of cleaning up after her. The other option is being too much alike and competing for everything until you hate each other.” She reaches a manicured finger to play with the string on my bikini top. “Do you want to go back to my room? I have a massive spa tub.”

 

I laugh, but what she said about Leo and me makes my stomach hurt.

Summer didn’t survive into adulthood by being a quitter. Even when everything seems stacked against her, she perseveres, clinging to the thought of and belief in her one true friend. How far will she have to go to find out what’s happened to Leo, and what will she risk to get her back?

You Can Trust Me explores female bonds and solidarity in a highly suspenseful, thoroughly absorbing manner. I was so invested in Summer and Leo’s relationship that there were times I had to put this book down because I was so scared that something irrevocably bad was about to happen to one or both of them. Better, my overwhelmed sympathies told me, to leave them in a limbo a la Schrodinger’s cat than to find out for certain and break my own heart.

But the story was so enthralling that I couldn’t stay away for long! While bad things do happen to our heroines, the ending was deeply satisfying, wrapping up all the book’s clever plot threads—I especially enjoyed the one about social media algorithms acting as a collective unconsciousness—into one dazzling tapestry of a thriller. This novel is the best kind of beach read: smart, sensitive and sexy all at once. I loved it.