Warning: I’m going to spoil the shit out of this book because I don’t want to subject anyone else to it.
I don’t normally post truly negative reviews (at worst, my reviews are lukewarm-ish). Most of the time when I don’t like a book, I stop reading it, and usually, it’s because I’m bored (and I don’t usually have much to say beyond “I was bored”, which hardly justifies writing a full review). I wanted to quit this book so many times, but the masochistic part of me just kept going in some sort of hate-induced frenzy. This is a bit of an anomaly, I don’t think I’ve felt such visceral hatred for a book since I read Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library back in 2020.
The book has some dark themes (suicide, murder, sexual violence, etc.) and, to be fair, it’s up front with the content warnings at the beginning of the book. I have a fairly high tolerance for these sorts of things, which I mention only to highlight that my dislike of this book is not a case of disliking the subject matter or the graphic depictions within.
The book tells the story of Piers Corbin, a woman who fakes her own death to escape her abusive husband who she is convinced is working up to killing her. She goes to live with her aunt in a remote mountain town, where she learns that she is descended from a line of women that have the ability to sense and draw bad men to them, and that are immune to the poisons they ingest in order to unleash them and kill those that deserve it. Most of the plot centers around Piers discovering and learning more about her abilities, keeping them secret from local law-enforcement, and attempting to catch a serial killer operating in the area.
The premise of this book was actually kind of interesting (the synopsis describes it as Practical Magic meets Gone Girl, which was intriguing), but the writing style wasn’t good (there’s so many weird metaphors and in general it feels overwritten) and the plot meanders and doesn’t come together satisfactorily.
Most of this book is written in first-person present tense (from the POV of the main character, Piers Corbin), whereas maybe a quarter of it is written in third-person past tense (from the POV of Emil Reyes, an police officer investigating Piers’ supposed suicide). The shifts were jarring, and the addition of an extra POV added absolutely nothing to the narrative (Emil’s investigation is basically just things the reader already knows).
There’s a very weirdly placed romance between Piers and the local sheriff, Regis (as well as a badly written sex scene comparing breasts to candied apples which gave me major ick). The book seemed to be setting up Regis as the killer—he has a mysteriously dead sister, one of the victims is an ex-girlfriend, Piers has a history of ignoring red flags and magically attracting and being attracted to terrible men, which would at least have made narrative sense. But, ultimately the killer is just some random dude who we’ve never seen before, who shows up for half a page and then gets immediately dispatched, which is possibly the most anticlimactic ending possible. Piers also kills her abusive ex-husband in an equally unsatisfying and brief way. There’s some poorly explained attempts to cover up both of these murders (as well as some murders she commits earlier in the book), which seemed like a big plot point but just sort of gets hand-waved away.
I could probably rant more about how much I disliked this, but I’ll leave it at that (part of me feels guilty that I can’t find anything nice to say about it).