What You Don't Know

When nostalgia meets reality, things can get ugly.

As What You Don't Know unfolds, that's the lifestyle clash a young mother encounters upon returning to her idealized, small-town childhood home. What she remembers are tree-lined streets, friendly neighbors and the child-nurturing bucolic environs. What she finds is corruption, murder, sexual assault, marital infidelity — a hard-drinking, hard-living world where little is what it appears to be. Will she resist or be drawn in?

While the old saying goes, "What you don't know can't hurt you," this mom soon finds out that what she doesn't know about her home town and its residents can indeed do her harm.

We first meet the young woman, Becca Norris, as she is winding down seven years in the showy, sun-baked, wealth-drenched United Arab Emirates city of Dubai — an experience that increasingly made her long for her hometown of Market in Central New York. She and her college-sweetheart husband Milt have built twin fast-track architectural careers in the Middle Eastern construction hotbed. But the 20-somethings also have started a family and they want their son and daughter raised the way they were: In the all-American, rock-solid, all-American, traditional, down-to-earth, real village of Rockboro in the heart of Market.

But the "real" part, at least, becomes more than they bargained for within months after they return.

At first, Becca found herself basking in the warmth of her Rockboro dream-life. Milt had lined up a well-paying job with an architectural/engineering firm in the nearby city of Gray so she could pour herself fulltime into home life and mothering 5-year-old Milt Jr. and 2-year-old Julia. As her son enters kindergarten, Becca immediately obtains a coveted leadership position in the PTA.

(Spoiler alert: The following contains a plot twist that some readers may prefer to not know in advance.)

This love affair with her new home continues as she befriends an older woman, Veronica Kovaks, who recently was at the center of a town corruption scandal. But when Kovaks — and her dog — are found bludgeoned to death, a series of events is set in motion that ensnares Becca in the underworld of her little town. At the same time, her family life begins to fray at the edges, pushing her close to the breaking point.

As Becca deals with her lifestyle meltdown, we also meet: the bitter daughter of an imprisoned town official struggling to rise above her wild youth to become a respectful single mother; a grieving father determined to show police have wrongly accused his deceased son of Kovaks' murder; a handsome ex-con who lives next door to Kovaks and takes a sexual interest in Becca; a pair of detectives whose shortcut to an arrest in the killing is called into question by a surprise jail- house revelation.

It all leads to a shocking conclusion as a hardened, harried and transformed Becca works with the detectives to find the true killer of her friend.