I think I will nearly always like a true crime adjacent book. Add in the faux oral history aspect of this one, and the fact that it’s about a family who choose to go on a reality TV show “to find their missing daughter” and my interest in this was pretty huge. It mostly delivered, but it was also a pretty straightforward thriller without much of interest to say about true crime or reality TV beyond that it’s gross, exploitative, and hurts people. It also kind of shot itself in the foot in terms of story tension, as the twists nearly always gave themselves away, mostly it seems on purpose?
So Kill Show is a fake oral history (the story is entirely told in interviews done by an invisible interviewer) about the events surrounding the reality TV show Searching for Sara ten years earlier. We are told this will be a published book, concerning the reality show and the events surrounding it. We hear from nearly everyone, including Sara’s father, who is in prison for a reason we won’t learn until later.
The plot was reasonably twisty, the characters reasonably interesting. There is a strange, toxic doomed sort of romance at the heart of the book, which I found a bit puzzling, but whatever. But again, the reveal that Sara is dead is given to us very early on. Why wasn’t that a twist? The author has created a situation where we as readers know nothing, and all the characters know mostly everything, so why not play with that more? It could have been two plot twists instead of one (well three instead of two, but spoilers), first that Sara was dead, and second the reveal of how she died. Instead, the main source of intrigue in the plot is finding out why she died.
The audiobook was pretty good, even though none of the narrators really stood out to me. It’s always fun to get a full cast narration, especially in books like this one that are playing with the line of reality and trying to make you forget what happened here is fiction.
Wouldn’t necessarily go out of my way to recommend this to anyone, but it was a good time if you like this sort of thing.
[3.5 stars, rounded down]
CBR BINGO: Scandal (can’t tell you what the scandal is bc SPOILERS)
