BOOK REVIEW – The Killer in Me by Margot Harrison

The Killer in Me by Margot Harrison
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Synopsis:

Seventeen-year-old Nina Barrows knows all about the Thief. She’s intimately familiar with his hunting methods: how he stalks and kills at random, how he disposes of his victims’ bodies in an abandoned mine in the deepest, most desolate part of a desert.

Now, for the first time, Nina has the chance to do something about the serial killer that no one else knows exists. With the help of her former best friend, Warren, she tracks the Thief two thousand miles, to his home turf—the deserts of New Mexico.

But the man she meets there seems nothing like the brutal sociopath with whom she’s had a disturbing connection her whole life. To anyone else, Dylan Shadwell is exactly what he appears to be: a young veteran committed to his girlfriend and her young daughter. As Nina spends more time with him, she begins to doubt the truth she once held as certain: Dylan Shadwell is the Thief. She even starts to wonder . . . what if there is no Thief?

► Let’s have a minute of silence dedicated to everything that was missing in The Killer in Me, okay?

✘RIP, suspense. You almost tricked me in the beginning, but soon it became clear that I’d entered a magical place where somehow, I am Sherlock (I am not). Not to be mean or anything, but I feel a little baffled by the fact that I’m supposed to acknowledge the existence of twists in there. Twists there aren’t, but rather long, laborious passages in which I know what’s happening and the MC just can’t FIGURE IT OUT. Did I mention that I was no Sherlock? Me guessing almost everything at 25% shouldn’t happen in a Thriller. Ever.

✘ RIP, suspension of disbelief (SoD). Again, buddy left too soon. Look, I am not one of these readers who ask for scientific accuracies in Science-Fiction, but even me have a hard time accepting fantastical explanations in contemporaries. I mean, where do we draw the line, then? If everything is possible, why bother finding believable plots? The Killer in Me abandoned any pretense of caring about logical reasoning early on, and in my opinion it weakened grandly the book – I call bullshit on this.

✘ RIP, coherence. Hey, look at SoD’s buddy trying to survive its friend! Of course it’s a fail! You cannot give up everything that makes a contemporary and hope that somehow it will keep working. It doesn’t. Each and every one of Nina’s doubts just does not make any sense, because she keeps forgetting facts that would destroy them :

[How can she doubt her visions when the details she knows about Dylan SCREAM that they’re real? If his name was the only information she ‘guessed’, I would have accepted it, but what of his girlfriend? His models? His freaking CAR? There is no way that she would have ‘absorbed’ these details as a child, so of course her visions are real, and I felt a little insulted in my intelligence when I saw her ‘doubting’ for pages and pages. P-lease. (hide spoiler)]View Spoiler »How can she doubt her visions when the details she knows about Dylan SCREAM that they’re real? If his name was the only information she ‘guessed’, I would have accepted it, but what of his girlfriend? His models? His freaking CAR? There is no way that she would have ‘absorbed’ these details as a child, so of course her visions are real, and I felt a little insulted in my intelligence when I saw her ‘doubting’ for pages and pages. P-lease. « Hide Spoiler

✘ RIP, showing. This one speaks for itself, or, rather, TELLS for itself.

✘ RIP, climax. I was expecting a thrilling descent into hell – what I got is a little hike in the mountains. Don’t be fooled, the atmosphere is dark, but my feelings stayed muffled and when the ending came, I just didn’t care anymore. There was no dilemma as far as I’m concerned, no nuances.

► Although I did like Warren and his loyalty to Nina, and that the writing, if unpretentious, was pretty compelling, with vivid descriptions sometimes, unfortunately The Killer in Me wasn’t the great book I’d been waiting for my come-back into reading. Disappointing.

PS. It feels so GOOD to write a review again. I’M BACK! WOOT! EVEN IF I’M IN THE MINORITY ON THIS ONE! I DON’T CARE! sorry, got a little excited here

*arc kindly provided by the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review*

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