Thanks to Netgalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review.
I am sad to say this will not be a positive review.
Firstly, I want to make it clear that the two stars here is specifically for the audio version. I think if I had read the hard copy I would have rounded up to three stars (me eleven months later: or maybe not). I found the narrator to have an exceptionally irritating way of speaking that emphasized everything about the book I was already annoyed by, i.e. the overly serious tone, the narrator’s stupidity, poor narrative choices, etc. The slower pace of the audio also gave me more time to dwell on the book’s flaws than I would have had I been able to read at the faster speed of a hard copy.
A warning: A lot of this is just going to boil down to the main complaint of “I didn’t like this,” which sometimes can’t be satisfactorily explained or justified. But a lot of it is also that this was one of the most predictable thrillers I’ve ever read (I predicted EVERY TWIST, including the big one about a quarter of the way in), and it had pretensions of literary greatness to be something not unlike a Tana French book, a greatness which it in no way was capable of reaching. But because it was reaching, it also couldn’t just have fun wallowing in the dirt and the scandal like your generic thriller because it was too busy trying to be moving or whatever. Unsatisfactory on all levels in that regard. All the tropes are played straight, and it takes itself SOOOO SERIOUSLY. The author also made the extremely poor decision to have her narrator be yet another substance abusing unreliable female narrator, and I’m just so sick of it. Do better, authors.
This part is a little harder to verbalize, because I’m not sure exactly what I would have wanted in its place, but when you have a main character who is the daughter of a serial killer, why don’t you take advantage of that goldmine? We barely get any backstory, no consideration of motive, no investigation into the crimes (we only get two or maybe three victims’ names) SPOILERS (in large part because the author wants to conceal until the last possible moment that the serial killer in jail wasn’t actually a killer and any investigation into him would make that immediately clear—here’s an idea, if you find yourself having to choose between sacrificing good story for a twist, don’t choose the twist, especially since it was beyond obvious the son did it from the start, and the father took the fall) END SPOILERS, and the consequences on his kids are limited to substance abuse issues and some mild aversions to intimacy. Real interesting stuff, there.
A completely wasted premise in my opinion.
I seem to be in the vast minority so far in disliking this book, so we’ll see what happens to its rating when it’s released to people beyond BOTM thriller addicts and ARC readers. (Me, eleven months later: I am still in the minority, and it’s upsetting.)
[2.5 stars]