This thriller follows Heather as she returns home after her mother took her own life. Going through her mother's things, she finds letters between her mother and a man - Michael Reave also known as the serial killer Red Wolf. Despite being locked in prison, women have started being murdered in the same way as the Red Wolf killings decades prior. The letters she found may help open some doors and the local police agree to let Heather talk to Michael to see if she can get him to open up at all. Heather may not be ready to hear some hard truths about her mother, Red Wolf, and their connection but as more women are killed, the pressure is on to find something that can help put a stop to the murders.
CW/TW: suicide, animal death, physical abuse, sexual abuse, serial murders
I think this book takes a really interesting angle on the typical serial killer story. I think most serial killer thrillers follow either a police detective or a journalist. And while Heather technically was a journalist, she was fired from her job so is really acting as a civilian in this story. Her journalism background only really comes up when she's trying to think of how to phrase her questions. She does eventually start her own investigation, but since the case is so personal it doesn't feel like a journalist investigation, it really feels like a daughter trying to find out more about her mother. The split POV/timeline between Heather in present day and Michael in the past was also interesting. We get snippets of Michael growing up and these chapters help the reader see him as a person (at least a little) and not just a serial killer. Now, we (or the other characters in the book) are in no way sympathetic toward Michael but when we're able to see the circumstances and situations that came together to create him it does add more humanity into his character. This story has a really obvious parallel to The Silence of the Lambs where our main character meets with a serial killer who often seems to go off on tangents but is actually giving relevant information about the current string of murders. However, in this story, since we have that additional view of Michael we get an extra layer of characterization and empathy.
This story does not shy away from the more horror aspects and I can see that really turning off some readers. I really liked how far the book went and I think it really helped build the overall atmosphere of the story. We get, in multiple chapters, women being stalked and abducted and we know they end up being killed (although the murder doesn't happen on page). I thought it was a really interesting choice to be in the POV of the women and not the killer in these chapters but it worked incredibly well. There's an underlying question throughout the book on if this new string of murders is a copy cat, an accomplice from the original killings, or if they arrested the wrong killer years ago. These chapters really feel like the opening to any crime show (CSI, Criminal Minds, etc) where we know something bad is going to happen to them but we just don't know exactly what or how it will happen. A lot of the horror elements really work well together to create a very suspenseful and tense read that had me flipping pages like crazy. I also really liked the fairy tale element was incorporated. Michael would tell Heather stories from Grimms' Fairy Tales that are very bloody and horrifying in their own right. At one point, Michael asks Heather if she knows the story of sleeping beauty but the real version and not the sanitized Disney version. I thought it was an interesting parallel to draw between Michael's 'real story' and the sanitized version we get of serial killers in the media. Getting Michael's POV chapters and the thoughts behind some of his actions in the past really help give a fuller picture to the horrors that happened. There's a real atmosphere of gritty reality to this book that I think works really well. These horror elements reminded me very much of the Hannibal TV show so if that was up your alley then I think this book would work for you too.
Where I felt the story did fall a little short for me was the character work. I'm a character driven reader and I felt like this book felt more plot-focused than character focused. I do find this to be the case with a lot of these more detective thrillers / police procedural thrillers but since this one had the family connection with Heather and her mother, I was expecting a bit more character focus. I felt like most of the characters were pretty flat and could be categorized as 'the best friend' and 'the detective' but they were both so involved with the story that I wanted some more depth to them. Even Heather felt a little flat for me and we're told she had a tense relationship with her mom and was fired from her job due to some 'incident' but I just didn't see those traits coming out on the page. I wouldn't say the characters were underdeveloped - I actually really liked the information we got about them - but I just wanted a little more from them. It is like I can list off a bunch of facts about each of the characters and those facts seem like they should manifest in the actual character actions or thoughts on page but don't (or at least they don't in the way I'm looking for). I thought Michael was the most developed character and that was mostly due to the fact that we saw him grow up from a child into the serial killer in jail we see in Heather's chapters.
While the characters were a little flat to me, I thought the plotting was really well done. We started out the book when Heather arrives at her mother's house and she finds the letters pretty quickly. There isn't a lot of 'downtime' in this story even though most of the first half is just Heather talking to Michael and then Googling other serial killers with her best friend. It really felt like each scene was laying down another breadcrumb for Heather (and the reader) to follow to the truth. And there were underlying elements of psychological horror/thriller like Heather may or may not have seen someone outside her house in the dark. I did find a few of the middle plot points to be a bit convenient (Heather having sudden flashbacks to her childhood type of convenient) but they were pretty small in the grand scheme of the story so I wasn't too bothered by them. I really liked the amount of agency Heather had in the plot - she wasn't just some pawn that was being used by Michael and/or the police. The pacing was also really consistent with clue after clue being revealed at a pretty steady rate.
The ending reveals were fantastic and this is the first thriller in a long time that made me want to start reading it immediately after finishing so I could follow all the breadcrumbs. The ending reveals made everything suddenly click in place in the best way. For example, Michael would usually tell Heather a fairy tale during her visits and he would tell her that he's given her the information she's looking for but she isn't really listening. At the time, it really does seem like he's just telling her stories and maybe playing mind games but once we get to the end, we can look back at those stories and see how they line up with the truth. One part about the ending that I wasn't sure about is how much we were supposed to be questioning if these current murders were connected to the past murders. There's a small question posed earlier on in the book of if Michael was imprisoned incorrectly and maybe the current murders are being done by the same killer from the decades before (Michael has always said he was innocent). However, that particular issue wasn't really ever a question that the police or Heather really considered for more than a fleeting thought. So I just wasn't sure if the answer to that question was something we were supposed to be surprised by in the ending or not.
Overall, this was exactly what I want from a serial killer thriller. It was a dark and twisty read with great pacing and great reveals.
Thanks to NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books for the ARC in exchange for review
Expected publication date is June 8, 2021.
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