The Girl Who Killed Her Mom - McGarvey Black - ★

AUTHOR: McGarvey Black

GENRE: Psychological Thriller

PUBLICATION DATE: October 10, 2024

RATING: 1 star.

In a Nutshell: No.

Plot Preview:

When she was fifteen, Abbie killed her mom. She wasn’t caught. Over the past twenty years, she has turned her life around. Now married to an extremely wealthy investor and living in a large home with her two little daughters, Abbie uses her time to be the best wife and mom, and volunteer for various social causes. However, the past has now come to haunt her. Someone knows her secret and is threatening to reveal it. With her husband unaware of her murky past, Abbie has to make sure that her secret stays buried.

The story comes to us in Abbie’s first-person perspective.

I am very picky with my thriller reads because more often than not, they turn out to be OTT messes. The title of this book eroded my resistance somewhat, and seeing the high ratings of the other books written by the same author, I thought I would be in good hands.

As is evident, I was wrong. Utterly wrong.

Bookish Yays:

🤩 Minor spoiler, sorry. But I HAD to include at least one thing I liked

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Abbie’s husband Jason. Unlike most domestic thrillers, it’s not the husband this time. Such a relief to see a thriller where the male spouse is actually a sensible guy and dotes on his wife and kids.

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Bookish Mixed Bags:

😐 Abbie. Great wife. Great mom. Great liar. Poor judge of character. Pathetic at decision-making. Expert at overthinking. We do want her situation to be sorted out because she shows that she has a good heart. But it is so tough to do so when her head is annoyingly short-sighted.

😐 The final two chapters in a book with sixty chapters. The only chapters that felt like they belonged to a psych thriller. They held just one good twist. Though there was a lot of telling in the writing, the mere fact that there was finally something out of the ordinary made me happy. (But not happy enough to push the rating upwards.)

Bookish Nays:

🙄 The I-killed-my-mom scene at the beginning – as holey as a crocheted doily!

🙄 As the above occurs right at the start of the book, the main plot is more on the lines of who-knows-about-it than who-did-it. And as it is quite clear who did do it, there’s no suspenseful hook to keep reading further.

🙄 A psych thriller must psych us out. This one doesn't do anything on those lines. You already know everything and you wait it out till the characters do what you expected them to do.

🙄 Why does the prologue refer to the past timeline as “twenty years ago” when the present timeline is labelled “nineteen years later”?

🙄 The whole old-priest-from-same-parish-who-has-lost-his-marbles-in-his-dotage arc. Abbie’s reaction in almost every interaction here is illogical to the extreme.

🙄 The utter lack of mystery. Not only is there never any doubt about who the guilty party is but no one even goes out of character. All the attempts at red herrings are blatantly obvious.

🙄 There is another first-person narrative later in the book. There is not even a moment of suspense about who this person could be – it is that predictable. This second narrative viewpoint serves to kill the plot further, as it turns even the remaining potential suspense into a tell-all infodump.

🙄 The event mentioned in the blurb, where Abbie gets a note threatening to expose her doesn't happen until the 38% mark.

🙄 The repetition – aargh! Whether scenes or thoughts or interactions, it was like the plot was going round and round the same two-three points. Abbie’s inner monologues are especially boring. There is one character in the book with dementia, but honestly Abbie behaved more like she herself had dementia, considering the way she kept looping the same musings over and over. This book needs multiple rounds of editing to streamline the writing.

All in all, this is definitely not what I had expected the book to be. It doesn’t work as a psych thriller, nor does it click as a domestic thriller. Heck, it isn't even a thriller for the most way. The writing is very much in your face, so you can probably make sense of the plot even if you read it while half-asleep.

The high ratings garnered by ALL the other books written by this author show that she is great at writing thrillers. But even the best of authors deliver a dud at times. Just my luck to end up with the sole clunker in her repertoire!

Sorry, but it’s a no from me. Please look at the other positive reviews and take a more informed decision.

My thanks to Joffe Books for a complimentary copy of “The Girl Who Killed Her Mom”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.