The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey

The List of Suspicious Things

 by Jennie Godfrey

 Sourcebooks Landmark, December 2025

Jennie Godfrey's 2024 British debut novel, The List of Suspicious Things, now available in the US from Sourcebooks Landmark, is a mystery/thriller set in West Yorkshire, England during the late 1970s. At the time, an infamous serial killer known as "the Yorkshire Ripper" was terrorizing the community, and Godfrey draws from both this unsettling situation and the gritty lower-middle-class setting to form the backdrop of her story. 

Godfrey opens with Miv reflecting on her life back in Yorkshire during those difficult years. Miv is ten, and her entire world revolves around her friendship with Sharon, but because of the Yorkshire Ripper, that friendship is threatened. The serial killer has caused so much fear and anxiety amongst the townsfolk that Miv's father is planning to move their family to a safer locale. Miv is devastated, and yet just precocious enough to develop a plan of her own. She says to Sharon:

"We’ll make a list . . . A list of the people and things we see that are suspicious. And then…and then we’ll investigate them.”

“And why exactly would we do this?” [Sharon asks.]

“Well, if we catch [the Ripper], we might get the reward the police are offering . . . Think of everything we could buy! All the books and lip glosses and sweets we could want.”

 It's no secret Miv isn't interested in candy. She's hoping to catch the serial killer to avoid having to leave Yorkshire and her best friend.

At this point readers would expect the story to play out as such and might even wonder if the real Yorkshire Ripper was indeed caught by two clever-beyond-their-years adolescents. This is, after all, the situation Godfrey sets up and the one emphasized on the book's back cover. But it isn't the story readers get. Far from it.

Instead of a chase-down-the-killer yarn, Godfrey alternates between Miv's first-person recollections and the third-person accounts of other key characters to illustrate the terrible, yet unrelated, mistreatment many townsfolk were forced to endure during those times. Interwoven subplots touch on child abuse, domestic violence, racism, bigotry, adultery, and white supremacy. To be fair, the subplots are loosely tied together with periodic returns to the girls' Ripper sleuthing, but the crux of the novel is Miv coming to age as she witnesses the wide variety of man's evil nature.

On the positive side, The List of Suspicious Things is well written and well paced. Godfrey moves her story along with solid, streamlined prose with few, if any, unnecessary diversions. The novel is bittersweet and sympathetic and emotionally impactful. And as a mystery/thriller, it's structured competently with a satisfying, exciting climax.

Sadly, those achievements are dulled by Godfrey's conformity to today's clichéd creative landscape. The main characters are young girls in the late 1970s who are somehow imbued with 2020s adult social awareness and moral sophistication. Each thread in Godfrey's tapestry features men doing vile things. Their victims are diverse and mostly marginalized people. The perpetrators (murderers, thugs, deviants, failures, cowards, and incompetents) are anything but diverse. By the time Godfrey sprinkles in subtle anti-Tory rhetoric and sanitizes everything that could potentially prompt a cancelling (racial slurs are replaced with dashes for those who might be offended by a word yet are somehow not offended by the surrounding context), most readers will likely think they've been baited and switched. They were sold a mystery/thriller where two girls were supposed to hunt down a serial killer, but they got a seemingly agenda-driven mystery/thriller where two girls encounter every -ist and -ism currently in vogue for mandatory examination in the contemporary publishing market. The only good thing to say here is that thankfully Godfrey doesn't preach. She merely cherry picks her characters and plot situations from what is apparently acceptable to publish nowadays and presents them all in situ.

So, again sadly, what might have been an excellent and unique novel is merely a somewhat tiresome one. Everything and everyone Godfrey portrays as despicable deserves to be portrayed as such, but the problem is, there's no nuance. No variation. No common sense. And thus, no believability. It all feels contrived to fit a particular ideological trend, that being: bad things are always caused by a single gender of a single race. History (and current events) would suggest that's far from true, yet this is what we get from Godfrey.

So why the bait and switch? 

The List of Suspicious Things is just the latest victim of today's checklist homogeneity, which by definition can, and usually does, infect creativity with illogic and predictability. The results are unrealistic, repetitive, and boring. Which may hint at an answer to the previous question. There is no question, however, that Godfrey is clearly capable of more. 

Jim Abbiati is a writer, book reviewer, and IT professional living in Mystic, Connecticut. He's the author of Fell's Hollow, The NORTAV Method for Writers, and has an MFA in Creative Writing from National University