Check me out, being all brave. I’m glad I mustered up some courage because this book ended up being surprisingly readable and at no point did I feel inclined to shove it in the freezer where it couldn’t hurt me. Think Big Little Lies meets True Blood with just a dash of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

A group of Southern housewives find distraction, friendship and a shared love of true crime in their weekly book club until one evening, Patricia Campbell is viciously attacked by an elderly neighbour, bringing the neighbour’s handsome neighbour into their lives. James is well traveled and well read, and he makes Patricia feel things she hasn’t felt in years. But when children on the other side of town go missing, their deaths written off by local police, Patricia has reason to believe James Harris is more than he seems.

Overall, this was an enjoyable and mostly compelling read that gets rather let down by, among other things, a very slow, gaslighting focused chunk in the middle that both drags and infuriates. Hendrix has taken the very popular ‘trouble in white suburbia’ trope and spiced things up not only with a horrifying predator (and some genuinely quite scary scenes) but also surprised me by touching on issues of gender, race and gentrification. Unfortunately, in some ways these weren’t handled as well as they could have been. Hendrix does engage with the problematic nature of ‘the white saviour’ but doesn’t subvert it as successfully as I think he intended, something that really isn’t helped by his treatment of POC characters in general who exclusively fill the roles of either ‘help’ or ‘victim’ and possess very little agency throughout. Unsurprisingly, from what I can gather from people brave enough to read horror regularly, there’s also a disproportionate focus on ‘the female form’ so if you like boob and pube descriptions, you’ve definitely got a whole bunch of them to choose from.

Entertaining enough that I destroyed it within a few hours but not without its issues.

Trigger warnings for both sexual assault and domestic abuse.