Grove Atlantic / Atlantic Crime
Published October 14, 2025
Reviewed by Mary-Jane Oltarzewski
Tom Ryan’s We Had a Hunch is structured like a TV series in which some episodes are solid, almost thrilling, and some are kind of beside the point, but overall, they make you want to keep watching. Like many of that kind of series, it relies on shifts in time to propel the plot. In the year 2000, Sam and Alice Van Dyne, the teenaged twin daughters of a smalltown police chief, become famous for helping their father solve crimes, and then notorious when their attempt to apprehend a serial killer referred to as The Janitor goes horribly wrong.
From the start, it’s a complicated story involving the twins, their parents, a pair of brothers inexplicably named Levi and Levon (they’re not even twins, although Alice is dating one of them in 2000, and winds up married to the other in the present day) and yet another teen detective named Joey O’Day. Joey is a smart, nerdy computer hacker who has become a little bit famous for solving some cyber crimes on the other side of town, and winds up somehow involved in the events that result in the deaths of the twins’ father and Alice’s boyfriend Levon, and the incarceration of the man known as The Janitor.
A quarter of a century later, the twins are still burdened with the memories of that fateful night. Alice remains a hometown girl, middle aged wife of the surviving brother Levi, and mother to their teenaged son. Sam is living in L.A., a freelance writer and former D-list TV celebrity who is still occasionally recognized as the villain of a reality show called Rebel House. She became briefly famous – for the second time – as the “rebel” whom viewers loved to hate: the one who addressed any and all adversaries with the catchphrase “you suspicious bitch.” The old gang gets together again when the current chief of police begins investigating another series of killings with M.O.s similar to those of the earlier “Janitor” murders. Bruce Philip Kershaw is incarcerated for the original killings, but he claims to know something about the current murder spree and of course, he won’t discuss it with anyone except Sam, Alice and Joey, who has outgrown his nerdish qualities and become a handsome, successful tech expert.
Early on, the thirty-something Alice ponders the differing perspectives that she and her sister had, regarding theories of the crime: “Sam always know it was all about the story … And Alice always knew that it was all about the characters.” The problem here is that there’s a potentially intriguing story that is distressingly overstuffed with subplots (can Alice’s marriage be saved, or will she leave Levi for her secret platonic stoner friend, a former victim of Levi’s former incarnation as a teenaged bully? Will Joey and his husband ever find time to adopt that baby they’ve been talking about, or will they move to Paris instead? ) and ancillary characters (Should we trust the Van Dyne family lawyer, or the twins’ music teacher from back in the day, who might know more than she’s telling – or not? How about the new chief of police, butting heads with that imperious, stuffed shirt investigator from the state? Then there’s this year’s nerd prodigy, the neighbor boy with the domineering father. He seems kind of cute, with that podcast “@RealTrueCrimeKid,” but is he just pretending to befriend Alice’s son in order to get a “scoop”? What about their other neighbor, the girl who was secretly dating one of the murder victims? ) There’s just so much packed in here, and not all of it justifies the way in which it interferes with the pacing and focus, especially when the final chapter concludes with a plot twist that reads like the kind of cliffhanger that writers and showrunners employ, in the hopes of scoring a Season 2, or a sequel. How the reader feels about this kind of ending will depend upon how much more you want to know, you suspicious bitch, about the grown-up, former Teen Detectives.