Living on a secluded island mansion, the Lighthouse family allows no outsider into their lives. The parents, obsessed with all things true crime, named their four children after various victims; the eldest, Charlie (the Lindbergh baby), his twin Tate (after Sharon Tate), Dahlia (after the Black Dahlia), and her twin Andrew (after Lizzie Borden’s father). Everything is fine in their lives until the sudden disappearance of Andy one night, with barely a note left behind.
Back on the island to bury her father after ten years away, Dahlia is horrified to discover that Andy’s body is already waiting in the burial plot, with an axe still stuck in his head (little on the nose there, isn’t it?) The family all deal with the shock in different ways: Dahlia blames Andy’s murder on the serial killer who terrorized the island for decades. Charlie decides to pour all his energy into creating a family memorial museum, highlighting their research into the lives of famous murder victims, desperate to show the townsfolk across the water that the family is not the weirdos they are believed to be. Tate continues with her popular dioramas portraying crime scenes; now with an added one of Andy. And their mother becomes the Happy Homemaker, completely erasing any hint of the woman who used to have her children perform reenactments of famous murders as education and entertainment. Circling through this all is the local police detective, who like his father has become obsessed with the family, desperate to uncover their secrets.
You have to love a book where you start out hating everyone and you end the book hating everyone. The characters are unsympathetic and unrealistically written. I don’t actually know who you’re supposed to like; Dahlia is neurotic, Charlie and Tate seem like their one step away from Thomas and Lucille Sharpe, and the mother is a cipher. The identity of the serial killer is pretty much easy to figure out within maybe two times of them being mentioned, and the great whodunit of Andy’s murder doesn’t come as that much of a surprise either. And the family’s decision over that? I guess at that point the author just decided that seeing as they are already so unlikable, why not just double down?
I am slowly coming to the conclusion that when the genre is “Suspense”, and frequently when the words “A Novel” follow the title, I should just avoid it. It’s not going to be my cup of tea in the least.