The Death of Jane Lawrence - Caitlin Starling

This gothic horror story follows Jane Shoringfield in an alternate version of post war England.  She is determined to find a husband and get married so she doesn't need to move from the town she's grown accustomed to.  The man that meets her calculation is Dr Augustine Lawrence and he agrees to her proposition on one condition - that she will never spend a night at his residence Lindridge Hall.  Jane agrees, and the two enter into a marriage of convenience.  However, after an accident strands Jane at Lindridge Hall, she finds Lawrence confused and paranoid.  As Jane spends more time at Lindridge Hall, she begins to find the skeletons in her new husband's closet.

TW/CW: medical procedures, pregnancy loss

The setting of this book was phenomenal.  I love a good rundown estate on the edge of town and book really delivered.  I really enjoyed the mythos and mystery surrounding Lindridge Hall and the Lawrence family.  I found the descriptions of the home to be perfectly balanced between giving us the information we need and setting a really nice atmosphere.  I really liked the details we get around Augustine's medical practice and his collection of specimens.  I also liked the details we get about Jane's home before they were married and Augustine's medical office/apartment but the core of the story is really Lindridge Hall.  Starling does a great job of laying down the breadcrumbs and little questions that get answered later on as we peel back more and more layers to the story.  I think these stories can sometimes rely too heavily on the spooky house aspect and it can come off as a bit cartoonish.  In this case, however, I didn't find it to be overdone at all.  While there were some rumors that Jane finds out about, it isn't like the town is terrified of Augustine.  If anything, the general town seems to really like Augustine and respect him as the town doctor. 

I liked the characters of Jane and Augustine and their budding relationship.  I found both of them to be really set in their characteristics but still had enough room for growth.  They really seemed to be a really good match and I was excited to see how they would work through this situation together.  There were some romantic elements but I didn't really find the romance arc of the story to be as well developed as I would have liked. Now, this isn't a romance book and it isn't marketed as one, but in order for certain plot points to advance, Jane and Augustine need to have a certain level of feelings for each other and I just didn't feel like there was enough development for my personal liking.  I do wish we would have gotten some more of Jane and Augustine working together.  We do get some scenes of them working in the medical office together which I really liked and showed how well they worked together as a team.  The book takes place only over a couple of weeks, but I do think there was a good amount of character development during that time.  

I did find the third act pacing was slower than I wanted it to be.  There's a certain time limit that Jane has and we go through each day of that time limit pretty in depth.  The actions Jane takes during this time are pretty repetitive which further add to the pacing dragging.  I think if the time frame had been a few days shorter, then it would have helped the pacing along.  I did find the plot and tension moving forward during this time, but not quickly or dramatically enough to out-shine the pacing issue I was having.  I found this problem did lessen the overall impact of the climax of the story and it was the main issue I had with the story.  I liked the substance and plot points we were hitting during this last third, but I wanted the delivery method to be a bit different.

The supernatural elements of the story were really well woven into the other plot points and wasn't overpowering.  I really liked the way the elements were introduced to the story and how skeptical Jane was at the beginning. She's very mathematically minded and I thought the way she processed the information she was getting from these different sources.  I also loved how her logical approach continued even when faced with aspects that she initially found unbelievable.  I did think the story was going to be more of Jane and Augustine teaming up together but it was really Jane's journey that we were following. I will say that some of the supernatural elements were not fully explained, which I personally thought really worked well with the other aspects of the plot but I know some readers like a more structured explanation of the events that happen in the book.  

Overall, I really enjoyed this book.  The setting was exactly what I want in a gothic horror and I found the characters to be well developed.  I did find the pacing to drag a bit toward the end, but overall I was really invested in the plot.  I thought the supernatural elements were well developed and well integrated into the story.  

Thanks to NetGalley and St Martin's Press for this ARC in exchange for review.  

Expected publication date is October 5, 2021.

Tender is the Flesh - Agustina Bazterrica

 

This horror novel takes place in the not so distant future where a virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans.  In response, the governments transitioned their populations to eating 'special meat' (human meat).  The protagonist of the story - Marcos - works in the slaughterhouse and processing plant for one of the larger corporations.  Despite his very lucrative position, he's recently undergone some personal tragedy in his life and finds himself unsure of how to move forward.  Then, he's given a gift of a very high quality human and as he's trying to figure out what to do with this gift, he starts to treat her like a human being - an action that has ramifications through the rest of his life. 

Translation by Sarah Moses

TW/CW: cannibalism, death of a child, pregnancy, animal abuse, animal death

I found this story to have a lot of layers and really interesting elements to it, but to me it was first and foremost a horror novel.  I found it to be a really interesting mix of gore and almost psychological horror and it does not ease the reader into the story.  From page 1 we are immediately dropped into this new world and are forced to face the brutal realities of this world.  The gore elements are certainly present on page, but they were given in an almost clinical manner.  While reading the sections that were explaining the different areas of the facility, I was having flashbacks to reading excerpts of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle in 8th grade social studies.  I really liked the choice to have the gore be present but not overwhelming.  The processing plant and holding facilities that were described in this book are very accurate to current day practices for animals so I think that made the actions of these characters hit a little closer to home than some readers may be comfortable with. I think this way of framing the cannibalism/gore elements also helped strengthen the psychological horror elements as well for both the reader and Marcos.

I thought Marcos's character was a really interesting lens for the reader to see this world through.  He's certainly in the middle of the production and he sees the violence and death on a regular basis.  However, he has recently become a vegetarian and we see his inner voice struggling with some aspects of his job.  We see through his POV that other characters seem to fall into one of two camps - 1: the people who know where this meat comes from but since it is cut up nice in a butcher shop, they try to put the origin out of their minds or 2: the ones who delight in the legal killing of other humans. While I was reading, there were a few times where I would sort of forget that the book is about farming humans and then there would be a new scene where that aspect was right front and center and it would almost surprise me all over again.  We see Marcos going through a sort of similar loop where he really dislikes and is almost disgusted by his job but on the other hand, it is a very prestigious position and when he's going out delivering and gathering orders around the area it is easy to forget that he's dealing with people and not pigs or cows.  That looping realization and re-realization really managed to get under my skin a bit and I think it upped the psychological impact of the overall story.  

The one part of this story that I didn't love was the pacing.  This was originally written in Spanish and then translated into English so this might just be a difference in types of story telling common in the two languages.  I found this book to be very heavy on the telling the reader what is going on and not showing.  There was a lot of almost factual explanation of what Marcos was doing.  There was a lot of "Marcos went here and talked to this person about X and then went over there and talked to another person about Y" type of scenes and it made the pacing at times go really quickly but other times seemed to slow it down.  In the storytelling tradition that I'm used to, this sort of 'telling' the reader comes across as very passive and I personally find it most impactful when we need to get from point A to point B quickly but we still need that journey on page.  Leaving out a lot of the setting description and actual conversation off the page lets us get through a lot of plot points fairly quickly, but it leaves me struggling to fill in the details and settle into the story.  I noticed it pretty quickly in the beginning of the story but that made sense to me since we were getting settled in this new world and we needed a lot of this set-up information as soon as possible.  However, this narrative style didn't really change in the course of the book and, for me, this lead me to be more distanced from the book that I normally like and left me a little disconnected by the end. I don't know if this narrative style was a specific choice in order to distance the reader from the story or if this was just a difference in storytelling and story structure traditions.  

Finally, I absolutely loved the ending but I fully acknowledge that not everyone will.  From a structural view, the ending came very quickly and ended almost abruptly.  I saw a few reviews that made a comment along the lines that it felt like the book was missing one more chapter where we could see the final outcome.  Personally, I usually do like a somewhat lengthy come down after a story's climax but in this case, it really felt like the ending mirrored the beginning.  In the beginning of the story, it felt like the reader was just dropped into this world that was already fully functioning and we observe the actions of these characters.  Then, at the end, we basically get picked back up out of the story just as quickly as we were dropped into it.  Then, the subject matter of the ending is also something I could see readers feeling very strongly about.  I really enjoyed the turn the ending took and I was glad it didn't go in the direction I thought it was going.  I can't really give more details because of spoilers, but I'll just say that I felt the ending we got stayed true to the characters and the world building that we'd seen over the previous 200 pages and that made the ending feel really 'right' to me.  There are so many different branches this story could have taken, but I really admire the decision to keep the story on the human level by focusing on Marcos and the other workers at the processing facility.  The ending, similarly, keeps the focus on the core human element of the story and I think it really hit a home run with it.

Overall, I really enjoyed this story and highly recommend you give it a try if you are even the faintest bit interested in it.  I really don't think a story about factory farming human meat is going to be for everyone (obviously) but I think this is a really powerful novel and it has some great horror elements that are really punchy without being overdone.  As I read more horror books, I'm finding I really enjoy the stories that focus on the humanity within the horror and how difficult some of these situations can be to manage. 

One By One - Ruth Ware

 

This mystery/thriller follows a group of coworkers who get snowed in during a company retreat.  What starts off as a morale-boosting trip turns deadly and as the group members start dropping one by one, the others need to overcome not only the winter elements, but also each other.  This is a closed-circle mystery story that is very obviously compared to (and pitched as a similar style story to) Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. Closed circle (or locked room) mysteries are probably my favorite sub-type of mystery when done well and by far my least favorite when done poorly.  Unfortunately, I found this story to fall in the later category and I ended up really disliking this story by the end. We do lean more into the thriller-y aspects in the last 1/3 of the story, but I found the majority of the plot to be focused on the mystery. This is my first Ruth Ware book and it was a pretty big miss for me, but there were pieces I liked and would be willing to give one of her other books a try in the future. 

I'll start with the pieces of this book I actually liked because I think it did have some successful points, but mostly in the less important aspects of the story.  I really enjoyed the setting of this mountain chalet for a company retreat.  I really enjoyed the choice to have these characters out of their element a bit and to see how the stresses of this new environment might increase already existing issues.  I thought the plot mechanic of how these characters get 'locked in' together worked really well and was easily believable and didn't feel overly contrived.   I did get a little confused with the explanation of the layout of the different chalets and ski trails but I was able to understand the key aspects even if I couldn't have drawn an accurate map or anything.  I also really liked the different characters all working at this company and how their different personalities really bounced off each other well.  I think there were some great relationships and tension moments set up but I would have loved to go deeper with these different characters.  All in all, the set up we get with the setting and characters at the beginning of the book really made me excited for this story but unfortunately the rest of the book went quickly downhill for me.

My favorite aspects of these types of mysteries is the pretty much built-in tension that the characters and the reader both know the killer is one of the people in this group.  We don't know who the killer is, but we do know that due to plot reasons (in this case, an avalanche that blocks their escape) no one can be getting into the group from the outside so if the bodies keep dropping, the murderer is in the building. Technically, this story was successful on this part as the avalanche does cut off the group from the outside world (and, thus, outside help).  The next layer of this tension comes from the fact that every character would have motive to kill one (or multiple) of the people in the group so there's a lot of finger pointing and uncertainty that comes from that aspect.  This is the part that, for me, really didn't hit.  The characters were given motives, but I wasn't convinced at all that these people would actually resort to murder for those reasons.   This, combined with the POV choices, really sucked all the tension out of this book for me.  The only reason I continued reading the story was in the hope that maybe Ware was going to give me a big twist at the end and reveal some sort of secret motive or maybe another layer to one of the established motives that would make me believe X character is the killer.  And while there was a sort of motive twist at the end, it wasn't effective for me at all and, honestly, made me sort of wish I had just stopped reading and looked up spoilers instead.  After I finished, I looked up a good number of reviews and there were a good number of people who thought there were enough motives mixed up in the group for them to be invested in that aspect of the mystery.  For me, however, I thought it was extremely obvious who the killer was from really early on in the book and I didn't feel like any of the other characters were suspects at any point in the book.  

The POV choices that Ware made were the source of a lot of my issues with this story.  The story is told through alternating chapters of only 2 of the characters and, in some aspects, these were the two most boring choices for character POV (in my opinion).  I really would have preferred this story to be told in either a single POV or if we got basically everyone's POV.  I thought the choice of only having 2 POV would cause me to discount theories or motives that I might otherwise pay more attention to because if those theories were about one of the other characters, I would say to myself "that can't be true b/c character X or Y should be involved since we're reading from their POV".  Again, I was waiting for maybe Ware to use that sort of logic against me and give a big reveal that included some of the theories I had originally discounted but that wasn't the case (at least, it wasn't the case for the theories that I was thinking of while reading, maybe it did work out for other readers).  The timing of the chapter cut offs and POV switches was well done until the last 1/3 of the book where suddenly it was almost like the POVs were overlapping.  So, for example, character X would spend 20 minutes doing something, then the POV would change in the next chapter to character Y and their chapter would start during the last 5 minutes of character X's chapter and then continue for another 20 minutes.  And that wouldn't be so bad except we would be constantly reminded of the events we just saw character X do by character Y making some comment about how they could hear character X doing whatever they were doing. It got so repetitive with this weird pattern of rewinding time and just seeing almost the same scene a second time before moving forward with the plot.  This really slowed down the pacing of the last 1/3 significantly - right at the time when we'd want the pacing to be going faster as we're getting into the more thriller-y plot points. 

The final point I'd like to make is about the ending and the final twists - mostly that I didn't feel there really were any.  Now, I don't mean that I was able to guess every little thing about the ending.  But rather that there wasn't anything that surprised me or twisted something I thought I knew into something brand new.  However, the information we get at the ending when we would normally get some sort of twist was just clarification and explanation on the killer's motive.  Now, granted, that explanation was new information and did change a little bit how the reader might think about a few of the characters in the book, but it wasn't that super satisfying surprise moment that I (and I think a lot of other readers) look for in a mystery.  I also wasn't a fan of the pacing in the last 1/3 (as discussed above) which really made the ending drag.  There's a pretty substantial come down after the climax moment which I did appreciate seeing how the surviving characters were dealing with the aftermath.  However, that long come down also had me waiting, thinking there would be one big final reveal but there wasn't.  Maybe if I hadn't read so many mysteries before and I wasn't anticipating there being a big twist at the end then I would have had a better reading experience.  However, the way the ending played out really made it feel like the icing on a pretty mediocre cake.

Overall, this was a pretty big flop for me because so many elements just didn't come together.  If there were some things changed such as the POV issues, then the same plot could have easily been a 4 or 5 star read.  However, the way this story was executed and the choices Ware made really weren't landing for me.  I would be interested in picking up another Ruth Ware book in the future, but I will probably need one to be highly recommended by trusted sources before I do.

The Corpse Flower - Anne Mette Hancock

 

This thriller follows journalist Heloise Kaldan as she begins to receive a series of letters allegedly written by wanted murder, Anna Kiel.  Wanted for a murder of a lawyer 3 years prior, Anna is suspected to have fled Denmark and hasn't been able to be found.  Heloise is, at first, skeptical that the letters are from Anna, but she investigates nonetheless and, after a series of escalating events, she finds herself working alongside homicide detective Erik Schafer.  The two work together to figure out if the letters are truly from Anna and if so, why has she decided to come out of hiding now and why did she choose to write to Heloise.  The answers to both questions might only be found if Heloise reveals the darkest parts of her own past.

TW/CW: child abuse, rape, suicide

I really enjoyed this story and even though I found it to be a pretty standard Nordic police procedural, I found the investigation plot and the reveals to be really engaging.  This book gets really dark in the last 25% and I wasn't expecting it to go where it went.  I personally love police procedural stories, especially Nordic Noir.  This story is set in Copenhagen, Denmark and I think it being set in a more urban setting instead of out in some small town in the frozen countryside (like a lot of Nordic Noir stories seem to be) could make this a more enjoyable read for someone who isn't super into that subgenre.  This is the first book in a series and I hope the rest of the series gets translated into English as well because I'd love to continue to follow Heloise. 

The character work in this book I thought was very well done.  We get two main POVs - Heloise and Schafer - as well as 2 additional POVs whose identities we don't know right away.  We also meet a number of different side characters such as Heloise's coworkers, her best friend, and Schafer's partner on the police force.  I really enjoyed that Heloise wasn't a complete loner-workaholic like a lot of journalists in these police thrillers tend to be.  Through these relationships with these secondary characters, it really felt like we would pull back layer after layer of Heloise and her past.  With Schafer as well, we got a bit of his frustrations with the legal system and how he was so sure that one character was involved in some crimes but just couldn't find any evidence of it.  Heloise is our main character but I would have liked to see Schafer on page more often and have his character a little more fully developed.  We get some scenes with him and his wife and I would have liked to have seen more of that side of him.  Since this is the first book in a series, maybe future books will explore his background more.  I thought the reveals at the end were really interesting, especially when it came to why Heloise was chosen to receive these letters.  I think the reveal did a nice job of walking the line between revealing more character backstory while also showing how far Heloise has come from those events in her past.

I also enjoyed the investigation thread and how all the pieces came together.  The story really starts out as more of a mystery where Heloise is trying to figure out if these letters are actually from Anna and if there's a chance that Anna was innocent but it pretty quickly got into thriller territory with the events and threats to Heloise escalating quickly.  Despite this being the first book in a series, all the investigation plot lines were tied up by the end of the book and it seems like the other two books in the series follow other cases that don't sound like they're connected to this case.  As I mentioned above, the subject matter of the ending reveal is pretty dark which I wasn't expecting from the tone of the rest of the book.  The story, generally, doesn't read as a super gritty or dark read so the subject matter at the end was a bit of a surprise.  I don't know if there's an actual word for this, but this investigation does what I love best in these mystery/thrillers were something or someone that was discounted from the investigation earlier ends up being important.  I just really love it when the reader knows we can't forget about X,Y, or Z just because the investigation says that lead is a dead end.  I did feel the ending glossed over some aspects that I would have liked to see on page but instead we just get a summary of what happened.  I understand that, from a narrative and pacing perspective, we can't dwell too long on the ending after the climax had already been reached but I was really interested in seeing how the ending panned out for everyone.  I really enjoyed how the author was a little bit hands off at the end where she wasn't going to spell everything out for the reader and instead just gave us a scene that shows us X character doing Y so the reader knows they were connected all along, but we're left on our own to fill in the finer details.

My main gripe with the story is that I found some details to be ultimately unimportant and I was frustrated by this.  Now, I'm not talking about red herrings or leads that the detective chases down only for them to be dead ends.  I'm talking about plot points where A is mentioned and the narrative is structured in such a way as to make the reader think that A is going to be really important.  A is somehow going to be the key to unlocking the mystery or A is going to become a big threat to our beloved characters.  But then, by the end, none of those things came true and in fact A was basically just mentioned once as a detail and never really explored further.  Obviously, I know that not every little detail in a story will be important to the overall plot - sometimes these details are just ways for the author to enrich the overall world they're building.  However, in this case there were 2 details that seemed they were going to be much more important overall.  I can't go into detail to the points because they would be spoilers, but they did make me pause at the end and think "wait, so was A and B just not important?" And I wouldn't call these plot hole necessarily and maybe other readers won't feel strongly about being led on by those details but I really thought both of those points were going to play a much bigger role overall when instead they were basically shoved under the rug.

As a final note, there were two small descriptions that made me take pause and since this is a translation from Danish to English, I'm not sure if these parts just didn't translate over well or if the wording was a deliberate choice (of course, since this is an ARC the final book may change these, but I wanted to mention them anyway).  The first is a description of Schafer's wife who is described as having 'jet-black' skin and the second is a character in a wheelchair who someone comments 'doesn't look disabled' because he's sitting up tall and straight in a picture.  In both of these instances, the narrative moved quickly onto the next point so neither point was really well explored and it could be easy to miss them if you're reading quickly.  I'm not dark skinned or disabled so I can't speak to how those passages would come across to members of those communities but I did want to mention them because they did stick out as I was reading.  The translation, overall, I thought was really well done and I didn't have many places that I paused over the actual phrasing or structure of the narrative.  There were some odd pop culture references to celebrities and TV shows which I think might not age very well.  The original story was written in 2017 and in Danish and I would be interested to know if these pop culture references were the same in the original story or if they were changed for the English version.

Overall, I really enjoyed this story and found the characters and investigation to be well developed.  There were a few parts that seemed like they should have played a bigger part in the overall story and thus slowed down the pacing a bit. 

Thanks to NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books for the ARC in exchange for review

Expected publication date is October 12, 2021.

Pearl - Josh Malerman

 

This horror novel is centered on Walter Kopple's farm and one particular pig named Pearl.  The story starts with one of Walter's grandsons killing another pig on the farm and tells everyone he heard a voice telling him to kill the pig and that voice belongs to Pearl and that killing was just the first of many to come.

TW/CW: Animal death, animal abuse

This is the third Josh Malerman book I've read (others were A House at the Bottom of a Lake and Goblin - reviews linked for those) and while those were pretty creepy and a little spooky at times, I found Pearl to be pretty much straight-up horror.  Malerman does not hold back - we get death and gore and terror right on the page.  I can't speak for other readers, but I remember being shocked when I found out that pigs aren't the cute pink little herbivores that children's picture books make them out to be and this book really plays up that fact (other examples of pigs being used for murder/body disposal include Hannibal by Thomas Harris - as well as the 2001 movie by the same name - and season 4 episode 25 of Criminal Minds).  I found the gore elements to be really visceral but not overly descriptive or drawn out so it didn't feel overdone or for pure shock value.  There are also psychological and supernatural horror elements to the story which I really enjoyed although some of those elements are where I got a bit confused (and will be discussed later).  There is also a really nice atmosphere of creeping dread during the lead up to the events where we see how unsettling Pearl has been to just about everyone who has ever met him. Malerman does an excellent job at showing the reader how each character is feeling about Pearl while Pearl just sits and stares at them.  Pearl, initially, doesn't look like much of a threat but the reactions and feelings each person has around him are very telling and extremely well executed from a writing perspective. This is a book about a psychic/telekinetic pig who used his powers to exact revenge on the humans around him and it goes all in on that premise.

I really enjoyed the wide array of characters we followed throughout this story.  I love Malerman's ability to just jump into a character and quickly catch the reader up on all the information we need to know about them.  We are jumping around in between 9 (I think) different characters and while we spend more time with some characters than others, that's still a lot to juggle.  I will say we don't get super deep with these characters, but we certainly get deep enough to understand their reactions to the events that unfold during the story. The majority of the story takes place over 1 day which some flashbacks as well as a little jump forward at the end so it makes sense that the reader is jumping all over the narrative to see what each of these characters are doing somewhat simultaneously.  The narrative style felt very similar to when there's a big event that happens on the news and they rotate through to different reporters who each are covering one aspect of the event. I usually prefer to have one main POV character and then have the other characters be a little more secondary but in this case, I honestly don't know who I would pick to be my primary character. 

The plot is, at its core, a revenge story and I was surprised at the amount of Pearl's backstory and development we got in the story.  We don't really see it until the later parts of the story, so most of the time I was reading I sort of was just along for the ride and perfectly okay with not really knowing how or why Pearl developed these abilities.  However, I did like the reveal of how Pearl came to be Pearl because we know how he ends up.  The reader knows how the shit hits the fan so when we see the little steps that Pearl took along the way, it is really interesting how it all comes together.  I also found it interesting how Pearl used his powers on his fellow animals and not just people which made the story more widely scary and makes the reader less likely to want Pearl to win.  The story was giving me big Animal Farm X Carrie vibes and I do wish we got a bit more of Pearl's plans or his goals before it went completely off the rails.

Where the book lost me a bit was at about the 60% mark where we see a new side to Pearl's abilities that took me out of the story, in a way. The first half of the story we see how Pearl's abilities work in a certain way and then suddenly there's this big jump in scale that I didn't feel was well explained or really made a whole lot of sense, especially given the ending.  It made Pearl's abilities feel a little too convenient for the plot (X character needs to do Y so now suddenly Pearl can do Z in order to make that happen).  The ending is similarly bonkers and gives us a different side to Pearl's abilities.  I re-read over the last 10% of the book a few times and still feel like something was going over my head so this might just be a me-issue and maybe not a problem for other readers.  I think if we saw more of a ramping up of power for Pearl then maybe the new powers would have been easier for me to be on board with but we almost get the opposite where we see Pearl being tired and his powers being stretched thin across too many people so I just ended up a bit confused and my confusion messed with my immersion. 

Overall, this was a fantastic horror read that really takes the premise and runs with it.  I loved the characters, horror elements, and plot structure.  I do think it goes a little too far at times and would have preferred the story to be a little more contained, but overall I think this will be a story that really sticks with me over time.

Thanks to NetGalley and Del Ray Books for the ARC in exchange for review

Expected publication date is October 12, 2021

(previously published in 2019 under the title On this, the Day of the Pig)

Five Strangers - E.V. Adamson

 

This mystery starts with the murder-suicide of a young couple in a public park in London. There are five bystanders who witness the tragedy and some even try to intervene.  With that many witnesses, you'd think that it was a pretty clear case of what happened.  However, our main character Jen is a journalist and not long after the killing, she's messaged by a mysterious Twitter account who tells her that not everything about that day is as it seems. This leads Jen down the rabbit hole of an investigation where everyone has something to hide and the truth might be closer than Jen would like to admit.  

TW/CW: animal death, suicide, infidelity, alcohol abuse, domestic abuse

The part I liked the most was the characters and character relationships.  The book alternates POV between Jen and her best friend Bex.  The two have been friends since meeting in college and have been there for each other through some pretty rough times.  While most of the story takes place in present day, we do get some flashbacks to significant moments in Jen's life and how Bex was there for her.  We know Jen has had a rough time lately with her 5 year relationship ending at the same time as losing her column in the paper, but she has been slowly getting back into a routine with the help of Bex and another journalist named Penelope, who Jen lives with and has an interesting somewhat mentor/mentee relationship. We get hints that Jen had some sort of breakdown previously and is in a somewhat delicate mental state so her relationships are really highlighted because she isn't doing much on her own these days. I really enjoyed how complex of a character Jen was, especially once we learn more about her back story.  Jen is a somewhat unreliable narrator as we learn when we get multiple accounts of the same event.  However, I didn't feel Jen was unreliable when it came to the present day investigation so it really seemed like she was still working through some traumatic events in her past but current-day she has been doing better.  Jen isn't the typical investigative journalist protagonist, which I really liked.  She's a bit of a mess and while she can pull it together for a little while, we see a lot of times how a small event can trigger a massive panic spiral.  Penelope is the calculating investigative journalist character, which often put her at odds with Jen due to their differing views and philosophies. 

The POV switching was interesting because it would often happen while we were in the middle of a scene with only Jen and Bex.  It was an interesting way to get both sides of the current scene, but I often found myself forgetting which POV we were in.  I didn't feel like the character voices were distinct enough for me to tell them apart unless they directly addressed the other character or if there were other details in the narrative that made it obvious.   Also, due to the POV switching, there are multiple times where the reader finds out information before Jen does which I felt really lessened the impact of the reveal once Jen does find out.  There are times where I have liked finding out information before the main character, but only when that information is so vague that it isn't immediately clear what is happening - when there's an un-named POV that might not be in the same time period as the main story, for example.  In this case, it felt like so many of the puzzle pieces were laid out for the reader that I could see the whole picture even if a piece was missing here or there.  There were times where it felt like Jen and Bex were fighting on page for who would be the main character.  I felt that Jen was 100% the main character so I wanted less of Bex's POV and more focus on Jen. 

The actual plot and investigation thread felt very unnatural because it felt like Jen basically had to have her hand held through the entire book.  Between Bex, Penelope, and the mystery Twitter account messaging her, it really felt like Jen had very little autonomy.  Before reading, I thought the mystery of this book was going to hinge on the different witnesses seeing different versions of the same events and Jen then investigates to see which version is correct.  That is not what happened in this book.  The actual physical events are never really thrown into question other than by the Twitter account who only makes a vague statement about the killings first and then turns into a sort of stalker account.  Also, the article Jen is researching and writing during the book didn't seem like her idea either but she sort of grabbed onto the idea since she's been having money troubles lately.  Now, I've never been a witness to a murder-suicide but it felt like Jen was unnaturally obsessed with the events to the point where she would almost get manic over trying to find out what the truth was that the Twitter account mentioned. As a note, I do think some of this feeling was done on purpose to show how vulnerable Jen is given her past history and current emotional state but I just don't think it was overall very effective. 

I did like the overall ending reveal and how that was handled.  However, I did think that Jen doing a full 180 didn't feel authentic to her character.  She spent 75% of the book convinced the answer was X and becoming obsessed with X then, at the end, she gets a couple of clues that the answer is really Y and then she's completely fine with leaving X in the dust.  I think the little clues that she gets about Y weren't enough to so suddenly dispel her obsession with X and it, again, felt like Jen was just being manipulated by the people around her. So while I don't quite buy the way that the ending twist was revealed, I did really enjoy the actual twist.  I think the fact that the reader gets so much information throughout the book really made the twist that much more surprising because it wasn't something that the reader knew ahead of time (but the clues were there if you pay close enough attention).

Overall, this book has an interesting premise, but the execution left me wanting more.  I did like Jen and her relationships with Bex and Penelope, but most of the actual investigation and plot felt really  heavy handed and took away from Jen's agency.  I didn't enjoy how much information was revealed ahead of time by the POV switching and I wanted more of a slow realization of the truth at the end. 

Thanks to NetGalley and Scarlet for the ARC in exchange for review

Expected publication date is October 5, 2021.