This was a great literary suspense debut, with one pretty big flaw that it feels like the author just really misjudged, but she is clearly a talented lady and I will definitely be reading her next book.
Firstly, I just want to complain a little that I can’t even manage to finish a novel in my own language let alone write and finish and PUBLISH a beautiful book in my SECOND*, and then have it be this good. So that’s just me being jealous and a little incredulous at how smart some people are. Moving on.
*(I am barely competent in Spanish.)
Secondly, this book is exactly what I wanted from Notes on an Execution, but didn’t really get: a smart, considered suspense novel that focuses on the women surrounding a serial killer/predator rather than exploring his motivations. We only see the women and the effects his actions have on them, not why he did any of it. That doesn’t matter. What matters is “Rachel,” the woman he one day decided to spare and hold hostage in the shed in his backyard instead of murdering, and what she’s had to become and do in order to survive. His daughter, Cecilia, who has just lost her mother and doesn’t know any other parent than her strict, controlling but seemingly loving father. And then there’s Emily (insert eyeroll here, but more on that later), the woman who has a MONSTROUS crush on him that seems to be reciprocated. There are also short interludes from all of his victims, in order.
Please don’t go in to this expecting a typical thriller with twists. This isn’t that, look elsewhere if that’s what you want. There are no twists here, other than the horrific things one person can do to another. It is a straightforward story told in an interesting way.
So the one big flaw, which singlehandedly brought this down from a five star read for me, was Emily. I think I get what the author was going for, having someone outside of the situation looking in, idealizing a monster from afar (she thinks she’s up close, though). But there are two problems with this: I think the author misjudged the desire for her audience to think someone falling in love with a serial killer would be interesting. I found it both boring and frustrating. And perhaps the bigger issue is that Emily herself was THE MOST ANNOYING PERSON. What a naive, self-centered, obnoxious, deluded little dumbass. She was SO unsympathetic. I know the author wanted to make her naive and have us see her as just another of his victims (literally, she was probably next on his list to kill), but she was insufferable. No inner life of her own. Constantly whining to herself that no one loves her, being INCREDIBLY needy about this jerk who isn’t even that great minus the serial killer stuff. Her personality was LOVE ME.
Worse, she isn’t narratively important. Nothing in the plot was essential to her being there, and nothing happened that couldn’t have happened thematically without her there, either. There’s no reason we couldn’t have some other woman he was targeting in her place, one that was well-adjusted and not annoying, and maybe had friends and an average life, so we could have seen what it would look like for a predator to go after someone like that. Maybe the point was that he picked her needy ass on purpose, but it was so awful to read, I wish she would have done something else. To make matters worse, the otherwise excellent audiobook had a woman named Elena Rey as the narrator for Emily, and her performance only added to Emily’s insufferability. Her voices for men, and the predator in particular, were ridiculous.
So anyway, this was a five star book if you cut out Emily entirely. With her, I’m still giving it a four because the rest of it was so good.