Book Review: The Good Samaritan by John Marrs

Posted April 6, 2018 by Sammie in book review, psychological thriller, three stars, thriller / 0 Comments

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Genre: Psychological thriller

Publisher: Thomas & Mercer (reprint)

Publication Date: April 12, 2018

Disclaimer: I received a free eARC of this via NetGalley in exchange for my honest, unbiased review.

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One-Line Summary

A slow-burn thriller told from the point of view of a mentally ill woman playing a deadly game of cat and mouse.

Summary

When Laura started volunteering at End of the Line, she didn’t exactly have helping those in need on her mind. What she intended to do, instead, was assist those looking to die by helping them commit a pain-free and successful suicide. She doesn’t even bat an eyelash at encouraging a pregnant young wife to be part of a double-suicide with a man that’s important to Laura who doesn’t want to die alone. Problem is, that wife had a husband, and he refuses to believe his wife just up and committed suicide.

Ryan devotes what’s left of his crumbling life, having lost his wife and son, to finding out what happened. He stumbles on End of the Line and realizes what Laura has been doing. While looking for proof to bring her to justice, what he finds instead is a cat-and-mouse game of wits with stakes so high they could mean life or death.

The Positives

The main character, Laura, is obsessed with listening to people’s dying breath, and I find that FASCINATING. In a creepy and morbid way, but I thought it was a bit of a unique angle for a main character. Her reasoning for it made sense. The first time she heard someone die, it was her mother passing from cancer, and it was the two of them alone in a room. The thought of that sound, as their little secret almost, gave her something of her mother to cling to and remind her. It’s morbid, but it’s an interesting bit of character building. Laura actually believes that when she’s allowed to hear someone’s last breath, she’s carrying them forward. They’re freed from their pain and suffering, and she carries them inside her.

Laura clearly has mental issues, and I sort of love it? Mental issues are really tricky in any sort of book. It starts out looking like she’s a psychopath, and she may well be, but she has so many more issues than that, and it slowly becomes more obvious as the story goes along. It gets to a point where I had to question everything I’d already read up until that point and things started making more sense as it went along.

Once things really started picking up, the plot was actually fascinating. I really wanted to know what was going to happen next, and it kept me turning pages. The stakes kept being upped, and the situation was more dangerous and entangled, which made it all the more interesting to read.

The Negatives

There’s a lot of info-dumping, which seems to just drag on. In fact, the way we learn about Laura and her story is through a tour of her house (which she hates), introducing us to the other characters as she snooped on them, and then ended in a mirror scene to describe what she looks like, of course. I hate mirror scenes with a passion. The whole thing is passive and not very entertaining, in my opinion, to just read about how little she likes her life. The character herself I find fascinating, which is maybe why this is particularly a let-down.

Most of the story is told through exposition and inner thoughts. Which might not bother some, but for me, I find it rather boring. There’s very little action. Everything happens off-screen, and then Laura tells us what happened after the fact. Most of it is just her thoughts, with some brief dialogue with some other people. It wasn’t particularly engaging to me, and since she’s not meant to be a likeable character, that sometimes made reading it challenging.

It didn’t feel much like a psychological thriller until about 60% of the way in, when it really picked up the pace. I’m not saying it has to move at breakneck speed, but this book really felt like it crawled along for a while. There were plenty of times I thought about just setting it aside, and I even considered adding it to the DNF list because it took so long to build up to anything.

There are so many times in this book that I was pulled out because I’m pretty sure that’s not how things work. Now, I’m not an expert, and I’m not about to do the research into British law, but if you volunteer at a suicide hotline, are you not required to inform the authorities when someone actually commits suicide on the phone with you? In any case, calls should be recorded, as far as I know, and would it not be standard procedure to look up calls made by someone who has committed suicide while on the phone with a suicide hotline or shortly after? All these things really jumped out at me, and I don’t know whether it’s done or not because I’m too lazy to research it, but it seemed unrealistic that there would be 24 people in a relatively short time span that were discovered had called the hotline right before committing suicide and the police do basically nothing. I won’t say too much because spoilers, but I also refuse to believe that Laura managed to have a perfectly healthy, normal persona and raise no red flags for anyone until this. Or that she would be allowed to work at End of the Line, given her history, and surely they would have had to do background checks.

There’s a horrible case of convenience going on here. Things don’t happen because they’re well calculated, carefully planned, and meticulously thought out. It’s all horrible coincidence. People are in the right place at the right time and make the wrong moves in just the perfect way to incriminate themselves. Also, anyone can quite easily, and without any skill, find out anyone else’s password at the exact moment they need to do something that will get that person in trouble. I can forgive a lucky coincidence or two, but it became too much for me, to the point where every time it happened I actually rolled my eyes.

Tony’s character is the absolute worst, and in a book full of people with questionable morals and a psychopath, that’s not a compliment. His character makes no sense at all to me, and I don’t understand any of his motives or decisions. Not a single one of them. Especially at the end. UGH, I WAS SO MAD. I won’t post anything because spoilers, but I actually like his character less than Laura, and he’s supposed to be “normal” and she’s supposed to be hated. So there’s that.

Overall

This was an okay book. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible. Overall, the thing that really knocked it down for me, aside from the slow start, were the amount of things that I just couldn’t believe. There were too many of them that by the end, I just wasn’t buying most of the story, and there’s little that irks me more than a psychological thriller that I can’t believe could actually happen. That’s part of the scariness of a psychological thriller, isn’t it, is the fact that people are horrible and this might actually happen? That was unfortunately lacking here for me. I did like the unique perspective and the terrifying take of a less-than-good Samaritan.

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