Love in the Time of Serial Killers

Phoebe Walsh knows a lot about serial killers.  If only she knew as much about love!

After her dad's unexpected death, she's come home to Florida to help her little brother Conner get their dad's house ready to sell and to use the time to wrap up her PhD dissertation on true crime and serial killers.

After a difficult childhood that saw her dysfunctional parents divorcing and she and Conner living with the opposite parent, she’s grown up largely alone and emotionally guarded. She’s also developed an almost obsessive interest in true crime, which makes her more than a little paranoid about how some men look and behave at times.

Take, for example, Sam, the young, attractive barefooted guy who appeared the night she first arrived and offered to help her unload the heavy desk strapped to the roof of her car. In a reverse scenario, serial killer Ted Bundy asked a woman for help with something in his car and look what happened there. Is this guy another Ted Bundy? Good looks CAN be deceiving.

That's the hook. It's up to the reader to find out if this guy is friend or foe, but it's a romance soooo ... duh. C’mon. 

I'm going to start with the positives:

It was well-written with good diversity and representation among the characters. It touches on deeper themes of childhood trauma, family dysfunction, grief, body positivity and overcoming emotional obstacles to intimacy, and does so with the humor and balance you'd expect from the genre.

The plot follows a pretty standard rom-com arc with the comfort of typical tropes and predictability, so I could just sit back and relax without worrying about an unexpected ending.

It has a cat. Enough said. 😺

Here’s where I struggled:

That cover oozed "Pick me!" vibes and perhaps a more fun read than what I experienced.  

I didn’t like Phoebe. At all. She was prickly, rude, sarcastic, crass and emotionally distant for a good chunk of the story. Despite her emotional transformation arc, even her nicest manner kept me at a distance I could never overcome.  I should’ve been rooting for her to “get the guy”, but instead I was rooting for him to come to his senses and run!

The bedroom stuff was WAY too anatomically descriptive for my preference. Eww. One more reference to “aching nipples” and I was going to lose my lunch, and that’s a tame example.

All that said, my biggest complaint was the sheer number of slang and pop culture references. It would’ve been fine if I’d known ALL of the movies, shows, literary references, true crimes, acronyms, etc. that the author used, but since she didn’t explain most of them, it felt like she kept winking and nudging me with her elbow to laugh at her jokes, which I then had to Google for understanding. It pulled me out of the story too often.

It’s a good book, but maybe just not the right one for me!

★★ ½  (rounded to 3)

Thanks to Berkley Publishing, Netgalley, and author Alicia Thompson for the digital ARC to honestly review. It’s due to be published August 16th, 2022.