Quick take
An unforgettable, thrilling look at the life of a private investigator working to uncover evidence for a historic case.
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Social issues
Critically acclaimed
Writer's life
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Synopsis
Part memoir and part literary true crime, Tell Me Everything is the mesmerizing story of a landmark sexual assault investigation and the female private investigator who helped crack it open.
Erika Krouse has one of those faces. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” people say, spilling confessions. In fall 2002, Erika accepts a new contract job investigating lawsuits as a private investigator. The role seems perfect for her, but she quickly realizes she has no idea what she’s doing. Then a lawyer named Grayson assigns her to investigate a sexual assault, a college student who was attacked by football players and recruits at a party a year earlier. Erika knows she should turn the assignment down. Her own history with sexual violence makes it all too personal. But she takes the job anyway, inspired by Grayson’s conviction that he could help change things forever. And maybe she could, too.
Over the next five years, Erika learns everything she can about P. I. technique, tracking down witnesses and investigating a culture of sexual assault and harassment ingrained in the university’s football program. But as the investigation grows into a national scandal and a historic civil rights case, Erika finds herself increasingly consumed. When the case and her life both implode at the same time, Erika must figure out how to help win the case without losing herself.
Content warning
This book contains descriptions of sexual assault and abuse.
Free sample
Get an early look from the first pages of Tell Me Everything.
Tell Me Everything
1
The Face
I became a private investigator because of my face. It’s an ordinary-looking face, but if I ask “How are you?” sometimes people start crying. “I’m getting a divorce,” they say. “He ended our marriage by text.” Or “I was just diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease.” Or a man grips a packet of peas in the frozen food aisle and asks, “How do you cook these? My wife died last month.”
Or an immaculately dressed woman suddenly tells me, “I hate my job so much I want to kill myself. I’ve been saving up Ambiens.”
Then we sit on a concrete curb, or stand in line at a train station, or clutch clear plastic cups at a party as the near-stranger in front of me dabs away mascara with a cocktail napkin and dumps out her mind like it’s her purse, like I’m the one who can sift through the dust and used tissues to find what she’s looking for.
Demographics don’t seem to matter. Young, old, women, men, nonbinary, gay, straight, rich, poor, East, West—everyone tells me things. A woman with twenty-six grandchildren and fifteen great-grandchildren whispered to me at her 101st birthday party that she wished she never had kids, that she had wasted her life on all these people. After I volunteered at an elementary school, a six-year-old followed me all the way to the bathroom to tell me in Spanish that her daddy’s not going to come home anymore.
Even as a kid, I was a storage locker for people’s secrets. Grown-ups confessed their affairs, lost fetuses, traumas. When I was seven, my maternal grandmother told me her husband chased her with a knife. One of my elementary school teachers told me he was leaving his wife because she hoarded pizza boxes and dead bugs. When I was fourteen, my mother’s friend yanked me aside and said, “I just want to say your mother is a bitch. You know she’s a bitch, right?” When I was seventeen, X, my abuser, blurted that he had denied a promotion to a friend at work because he was Black. This wasn’t intimacy; we hated each other.
Why I love it
Lacy Crawford
Author, Notes on a Silencing
Imagine a heart-stopping true crime story. Assume multiple victims and villains behind villains, all in thrall to a powerful organization that abuses women to stay on top. Now imagine that the storyteller can’t maintain the psychological distance authors usually do, narrating from a place of safety—not only because she is a crime victim herself, but also because she’s the unlikely private investigator whose conversations are, secret by secret, exposing evil.
Erika Krouse was an award-winning fiction writer at the top of her game when she was hired by a lawyer in her Colorado town. Within months, she burrowed into the network of perpetrators and enablers who made up the unimaginably dark side of the local university’s Division 1 football team. Predicated on “showing [the recruits] a good time,” this culture preyed on young women and was guarded by men more powerful than Krouse could have dreamed.
Krouse tracks both the drama of the PI cat-and-mouse game and the internal reckoning of her own experience of childhood sexual assault. The reader learns about her private struggle, but to her witnesses, she’s a cipher; she’s a genius. She’s your best friend. “I became a private investigator because of my face,” she writes. “It’s an ordinary face, but if I ask, ‘How are you?’ sometimes people start crying.”
Oh, I cried reading Tell Me Everything. I also cheered. Because this story, unlike so many true crime tales, has a happy ending. It’s a pure triumph of investigation, narration, intelligence, and heart.
Member ratings (13,606)
Cassandra K.
Lisbon, CT
Really interesting read. I’m fascinated by PI work, and I just couldn’t put it down. I don’t usually read memoirs, but I’m very glad I picked this one up. It could have been fiction, unfortunately…
Madeline C.
Alexandria, VA
AMAZING. As a sexual assault survivor, this book was incredibly cathartic. It also dealt with abusive family stuff which was very meaningful as well. If you haven’t dealt with your trauma, don’t read
Isaac W.
West Hollywood, CA
An incredible book! Yes it has tough passages but it’s equally tough to put down…so incredibly well written. It reads so quickly and the story is harrowing and hopeful making it a vital book to read!
Erin L.
Carlsbad, CA
To call this “so interesting” is trite and incomplete, but it is also a perfect description. The author’s experiences and perspectives, the case itself, everyone involved…just so darn engrossing.
Jessy C.
Washington , DC
What an incredible book! Read like a work of fiction, but with details so raw & vivid, you’re reminded it’s true. She shared so much of herself. The good & bad, the anguish from her life & the case.