Four people are found dead in a vacation home in Mexico, leaving only NYU student, Matt, and convicted murderer, Danny, as the surviving members of the Pine family. Danny was the subject of a documentary series investigating if he was wrongfully convicted of killing his girlfriend in high school. Matt returns to his hometown in Nebraska for the funeral and is faced with hostility from the townspeople who were villainized by the docu-series as well as a fresh round of media attention. As the deaths in Mexico start looking less and less like an accident, Matt must unearth the truth about what happened with Danny years ago and how it could be connected to the current deaths.
The first thing I want to address is the language used in this book when describing Mexico/Mexican people. I did read an ARC so there's a chance that some things may change in the finished copy but in the copy I read, I found the language negative, condescending, and judgemental. The town is Tulum, Mexico and is first described as a destination for celebrities because it isn't as crowded as the usual tourist spots. That description lead me to expect that when our protagonist, Matt, goes to Tulum that the beauty of the area would be in direct contrast with his grief. However, the descriptions that Matt gives to the reader are very negative to the point where I didn't understand how celebrities would be going to this place and the different images the book was giving the reader about Tulum didn't really make sense to me. Again, I was expecting Matt to not like it there because of the reason for his visit, but I didn't expect so many descriptions about how run down and corrupt everything was. As a white reader, these descriptions made me take pause so I looked at other reviews and there were a number of readers of color who explicitly called out the language in these scenes as problematic and offensive. There's a chance that these descriptions could be changed in the final copy of the book, but I wanted to point it out now so readers are aware going in.
This book had a lot of potential to be a new favorite but there were a few pieces that fell flat for me and overall this ended up just being an okay read. My main issue is that this book is being marketed as a psychological thriller but I found it to be a pretty even 50% detective 50% domestic thriller. I kept hoping the narrative would take a twist to being more psychological but it never did. I think it did a good job at being a detective/domestic thriller but I was overall disappointed that this wasn't the type of story I was expecting. When I see a book being marketed as a psychological thriller, I'm expecting some sort of cat and mouse or some other sort of mind games to come into play. I'm expecting the big bad to be directly influencing the protagonist and making them question what they think is the truth. I found this to be a lot more straightforward physical thriller where the main character is put in some dangerous situations they have to survive. The only psychological danger Matt was in was dealing with his grief over losing his family (which I didn't feel as strongly as I think the story wanted me to). He didn't even seem that invested in independently figuring out what happened to them - it seemed to me he was fine letting the police and FBI do the investigating. The psychological aspect came in more with the flashbacks to the family before they died but it was such a small part of the story that I wouldn't use it as the main selling point of the plot.
This story was told in multi-POVs and dual timelines which I usually am a sucker for. In this case, however, I didn't absolutely love it. There were a number of chapters that just felt like filler. It wasn't as if a whole POV was unnecessary, but just the occasional chapter here and there that I didn't think was necessary. I can stand back and look at the chapters from a structural or plot standpoint and say "that chapter established X relationship" or "that chapter showed how Y changed" so I think all the chapters were technically needed for the plot, but I sure didn't care when I was reading some of them. There were a number of subplots that I really didn't care about but I knew that if they were in the book then they must be important to the ending so I had to read them. I think the best multi-POV stories are the ones where all the POVs are entertaining to the reader so even when the POV changes, the reader shouldn't ever feel disappointed. I thought the dual timeline was very well done and it was really interesting for the reader to know one thing from timeline A but then see the characters find out about it in timeline B a few chapters down the line. I also think showing the lead up of the family before they died made their on-page deaths really emotional because we've gotten to know them over the past 300 pages and we're hoping for a different outcome even though we know exactly how this is going to end.
Detective thrillers are one of my favorite types and I think the FBI investigation portions of this book were really well done. Looking back, I would have preferred if this same plot was handled as a pure detective story since I didn't really enjoy the domestic side of the story as much with Matt grieving and going back to his hometown. My favorite character was FBI Agent Keller and I would read more books following her specifically. I found her to have the most well-rounded characterization in the book. Everyone else I felt like we know one or two main aspects of their personality and that's it. For example, we know Matt likes movies. He's going to NYU to study film and he is constantly making movie references and his friends make comments about how he is constantly making movie references. And since Matt seemed to be content at letting Agent Kelley do her job, I didn't really feel a need to follow him around at all. There were a few thrilling scenes in Matt's chapters, but they were the minority and when I think back over the story as a whole, those scenes don't stick out in my mind.
This story did finish really strongly which I think is one of the most important parts of any thriller. The last 20% or so was really great and when the puzzle pieces started falling into place, I couldn't read fast enough to figure out all the different connections. From a plot perspective, the big reveals were pretty standard for a domestic thriller but it was still a satisfying conclusion. The ending was a little bittersweet for reasons I can't go into because of spoilers but the chapters in this last section were very short and we were jumping in between POVs very quickly which really ramped up the tension as well. There were two sort of epilogues at the very end after a time jump so we do see all the plot strings tied up by the end which is always satisfying.
I really liked how the docu-series was integrated into the story. There would be some chapters where we would read the script from a scene from the documentary. We also got different character's perspectives on the documentary and it was interesting to see the after effects especially since true-crime documentaries/podcasts/etc are very popular. The documentary scenes served as nice little breaks in the narrative so I could get a moment before jumping back into the investigation. I think it was also interesting since the documentary filmmakers also showed up in the current investigation so seeing how people reacted to them now vs how they reacted in the initial filming was cool.
Overall, this story had a lot of interesting aspects that in the end just fell a bit flat for me. It was a journey to find out how everything is connected and while the ending was solid, the journey getting there wasn't as interesting as I would have hoped. This is a solid debut that had some really strong elements and I'm interested to see what Finlay writes in the future.
368 pages
Thanks to NetGalley and Minotaur Books for the ARC.
Expected publication date: March 2, 2021.
No comments:
Post a Comment