Book Review

Love in the Time of Serial Killers by Alicia Thompson

Love in the Time of Serial Killers is an enjoyable book, but I struggle to classify it purely as a romance because so much of the novel is spent on the heroine overcoming her anxieties and struggling to move forward in her adult life. By contrast the hero really has no obstacles to overcome; he just has to wait for the heroine.

Phoebe Walsh is busy working on her dissertation about rhetoric and genre theory in respect to true crime books. She’s also cleaning out her late father’s home in Florida after he passes suddenly from a heart attack.

As I said, a lot of this book is about Phoebe’s growth. She stopped seeing her dad as a teenager (her parents were divorced) as she struggled with his hoarding and emotional outbursts, so being in his home is triggering from her in some ways. Helping her ready the property for sale is her much younger brother, Connor. He lived with her dad full-time, so the two of them have a pretty superficial relationship. Right off the bat we have Phoebe dealing with her childhood trauma and trying to forge a relationship with a brother she doesn’t know well, all while balancing the stress of that against the stress of writing her dissertation.

The night she arrives at her father’s home, she runs into his next door neighbor Sam. Having listened to true crime podcasts the entire drive to Florida (and being obviously versant in the genre), she’s immediately suspicious of why his neighbor is up in the middle of the night and offering to help her unload her car. She maybe threatens to mace him. Some of the initial conflict in the romance is that Phoebe is suspicious of Sam (and people in general) given how immersed she is in true crime. This is mostly played up as comedy, but it does highlight how isolated Phoebe is in general.

The big conflict in the book is how Phoebe will work through that isolation to build relationships (with Sam, with Connor, with her former high school friend, etc) and emerge from the shell she’s used to protect herself. She also gets adopted by a cat she thinks she doesn’t want.

Phoebe’s dad was prone to outbursts and childish behaviors. For example, when she and her brother ate all the marshmallows on a camping trip, he took the car and abandoned Phoebe, her mom and her brother at the campsite, even as the next guest was trying to set up their equipment, humiliating Phoebe and her family.

Phoebe’s dad’s instability leads to her not feeling safe at home, hence her departure as a teen. It also causes her to look for ways to feel safe as an adult. It might sound strange, but true crime is part of that. She says:

“I feel like I grew up afraid of so many things,” I said. “There’s just so much uncertainty in life, especially when you’re a kid…you don’t know why your dad is upset, or why your mom puts up with it, or whether you’ll ever have a true friend you could talk to. It sounds twisted, but by the time I was a teenager, there was something almost comforting about reading about serial killers. It was like, here, be afraid of this. Focus on this. There’s uncertainty, and open questions, but it’ll all get wrapped up at the end. Justice will be served, the victims will be remembered, whatever. It was only when I started reading and rereading some of those books more closely that I started questioning what justice meant, or truth, or even fear.”

I get what Phoebe is saying here. I’ve been drawn to mysteries and thrillers my entire life. Some of that is due to the fact that I do like spooky stuff, and some of it is the comfort of having a resolution at the end. The killer will be found. Answers will be had. It’s similar to romance in the sense that you know, going into the book, that you will have a specific sort of ending, and that’s a comfort.

I do disagree a bit with her assessment of true crime falling into this bucket. A lot of true crime is unsolved or involves questions regarding whether justice was really done (think Serial). Also, and she does acknowledge this briefly in the book, as a genre true crime is skewed incredibly White. The stories of victims of color or indigenous people aren’t told at nearly the same rate as those of White people (especially White women and girls of a specific class status). As a genre, true crime is very messy and often tells incomplete stories that do and should leave the reader/listener/viewer questioning the resolution.

When Phoebe realizes that Sam is a normal human being and not an axe murderer (he actually teaches elementary school music which terrifies me almost equally) the two begin to connect due to forced proximity. There’s a mutual attraction which makes Phoebe question the walls she’s built around herself–she’s been so focused on her academic career that she doesn’t have room for anything else (or so she’s told herself).

The romance is sweet, and often funny, but it’s just very one-sided. This is a first person POV book, which is tricky to pull off in the first place, but in this case I felt like I only knew Sam on a very surface level. He’s a teacher, he plays a few instruments, he’s a bit of a nerd, and his ex was really mean to him when she broke up with him. There isn’t a lot of there there. Sam really doesn’t need to overcome anything to grow or change to find happiness with Phoebe. He just sort of stands in place and waits for her to get her issues resolved, and as a result his story felt very superficial.

Love in the Time of Serial Killers does feature a good amount of character growth, though it is limited to the heroine. She has a lot of trauma and personal history to work through. There is humor and lots of references to true crime that fans of the genre will appreciate. It’s just lopsided as a romance.

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Love in the Time of Serial Killers by Alicia Thompson

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  1. Gail says:

    I was pretty excited about this book but I just could not hold on very long. I listened to it, which often adds so much, but also, as in this case, can detract. The way her behavior was so repetitive and irrational made me think that it was meant to be humorous but instead it just made me irritated at her incredible immature behavior. Based on the review, I am happy I cut line.

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