Sometimes writers have to scratch around and dig in to find the best stories, and sometimes great ideas come to them through their network. Great journalists have sources and relationships wide enough that bigger, better, stranger, deeper ideas are always landing on their doorstep.

There’s another category of story, however: The one that happens to you without you realizing. Often it produces the inward-looking, essayish text. But sometimes, as the young Canadian journalist Karen Ho discovered, it’s pure dynamite.

Jennifer Pan was one of Karen’s acquaintances from school, somebody she could empathize with and understand. Until, that is, it became apparent that she was at the heart of a bizarre, horrific crime.

Jennifer and I both played the flute, though she was in the senior stage band and I was in junior. We would interact in the band room, had dozens of mutual acquaintances and were friends on Facebook. In conversation, she always seemed focused on the moment — if you had her attention, you had it completely.

I discovered later that Jennifer’s friendly, confident persona was a façade, beneath which she was tormented by feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt and shame.

I don’t want to spoil it, but “Jennifer Pan’s Revenge” (from Toronto Life magazine) is detailed study in how a bizarre and gut-wrenching crime comes about — how a tower of lies turns into a sprawling mess when it collapses.

“Two of the biggest surprises I uncovered along the way were the extent of the lies,” Karen told me when I emailed her at the weekend. “And how close one of the locations (Jennifer’s father’s workplace Kobay Enstel) was to the house I grew up in.”

The story is also great in another way: It’s from a magazine I’d never heard of, that is obviously producing some great work, and is able to make it out into the world — not just in one Canadian city. Yay internet.

“The reaction I’ve had is nothing short of astounding. I was hoping for maybe 50,000 people to read the story. It wasn’t even featured on the cover of the magazine’s print edition. I never dreamed it would be recommended by the NYT Now app, go viral in places like Indonesia or read by journalists like Jay Caspian Kang.”

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If you’ve got any suggestions for stories we should be linking to, respond to this post on Medium with your own suggestions, or tweet @IfYouOnly.