Don't Tell Me How to Die - Marshall Karp - ★★.½

AUTHOR: Marshall Karp

GENRE: Domestic Thriller.

PUBLICATION DATE: March 4, 2025.

RATING: 2.6 stars.

In a Nutshell: An interesting and twisty domestic suspense about a woman on a mission before her time runs out. Marketed as a thriller, but not a thriller for the most way. I did enjoy the regular twists and surprises, but hated the deliberate misleading. I would still recommended this, but not as a must-read. Be ready to suspend disbelief. This is an outlier review.

Plot Preview:

Forty-three-year-old Maggie Dunn has it all: a handsome husband who loves her and is also a successful surgeon, twin teens who have a great rapport with each other and their parents, loving extended family (father, grandfather, and younger sister Libby), and a high-profile job as the mayor of their town. Now, something she has dreaded since the last twenty-five years has finally been confirmed: Maggie is going to die soon. And of the same illness that killed her mother at the same age.

Cut to twenty-five years ago, when Maggie, just a high schooler, loses her mother to a rare disease. Before dying, her mother warns her that single women will swarm to their father and that Maggie and Libby should make sure that no one misuses him. Now, all these years later, Maggie feels like she too should ensure that she finds a suitable replacement for herself to take over after her death.

The story comes to us *mostly* in Maggie’s first-person perspective.

I don’t know what I expected from this book. I just jumped onto the hype-wagon, even though I am not a huge thriller fan, because almost all my friends gave this novel top stars. This story is not typical, I give you that. It offers a fairly enjoyable journey, but only if you don’t think too much about the deeper nuances. If you can leave your analytical caps aside, this can be a twisty entertainer. I find it to tough to part with my thinking cap, so...

Bookish Yays:

🔪 An excellent prologue with great promise.

🔪 The storyline of Maggie’s parents from a quarter century before – sweet. Not what I expected in a “thriller”, but it was a nice arc.

🔪 Many strong secondary characters. Lizzie is wonderful, and her bond with Maggie comes out strongly. I also liked Johnny Rollo’s character – probably among the few times I would count a shady druggie among my favourite characters of a book. Maggie’s twins, though in a relatively limited role, are impressive. I love how they actually act their age. Probably the only characters in the book to do so, other than Maggie’s dad and granddad, who are also amazing in their tertiary roles.

🔪 The timeline, with all events coming from time markers stating a period before/after "the funeral." Might be complicated to follow for those who don’t enjoy jumpy timelines, but I mostly enjoyed keeping up with the plot from across different timepoints.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

☠️ Is this really a thriller? The prologue shows signs of a mystery, but after that till about the final quarter, the book reads more like a normal domestic drama. (Not a thriller kind of domestic drama but the women's fiction kind.) Only the last section feels like a thriller. The cover and title seem to promise a much darker story.

☠️ Maggie is a man’s dream-come-true character in many ways, hence absolutely not convincing to me as a woman. Though I found some of her traits admirable, I don’t relate to women like her. So I couldn’t really root for her and found her behaviour unrealistic.

☠️ I thought this line from the blurb was exaggerated: “I have three months, and I plan to spend every waking minute searching for the perfect woman to take my place as Alex’s wife, and mother to Kevin and Katie.” It was not. While the plot handles this decently, it is still odd to read about a woman who wants to spend her final days searching for her substitute for her husband.

☠️ The story takes a long while to get going. It feels a bit episodic at times, with a distinct subplot tackled one at a time in sequence. Many times, I wondered where the heck the book was going. The subplots were mostly interesting, but too disconnected to feel like part of the same story.

☠️ There are quite a few twists and turns: some guessable, some unexpected, some good, some downright idiotic. All the twisty content is restricted to the second half, which further enhances the dramatic feels of the first half.

☠️ The ending, keeping aside shady morals and logical flaws, works excellently for the story. So the key question is: can you ignore shady morals and logical flaws? I can ignore the former but not the latter.

Bookish Nays:

💣 My BIGGEST issue with the book: The unreliable narrator trope of the annoying kind, where the narrator doesn’t tell you stuff until they decide to tell you stuff. Imagine a character narrating an incident, and many chapters later, taking you back to that very incident and giving you the complete picture of what happened. Never a fan of such deliberate misleading and needless secret-keeping! All the more irritating as the story is written in first person so we should have received all the deets on time.

💣 Sorry for this misandrist feedback, but this has many examples of “man-writing-woman.” This isn't an umbrella statement, and there are a couple of good women characters in the book. (Mainly Kate, Lizzie and Beth who have their share of positives though they are not perfect.) But the others – yikes! Many scenes reek of generalised misogyny. And I don’t know about other readers, but I found the man-writing-teen-girl content very awkward to read. It was more like wishful thinking than reality.

💣 Speaking of Beth, where is she afterwards? Why do we get to hear only about Maggie’s dad and granddad?

💣 Thanks to the episodic structure, the pacing feels very dragged. This might especially bother those who expect a pacey thriller from a book with such a title and cover.

💣 Too much casual drug usage for my liking.

💣 Vague spoiler: Wouldn't an experienced con artist change their name for each new con, especially if they've already been to prison for a similar crime earlier?

All in all, the book did have some positives, but

a. it is not at all a thriller as promised;

b. it is too slow and episodic to be gripping; and

c. the man-writing-woman content is quite offensive.

The first half was still quite strong for me, perhaps around 3.75 stars if I rated it for its storytelling than for its merits as a thriller. But the second half, which had more of the promised twisty thriller, let me down with the deliberately deceptive revelations by Maggie.

Recommended to those who read thrillers without overthinking and without asking hows or whys. Oh, and better if you expect a suspense-drama rather than a thriller.

2.6 stars. (3.75 stars for the first half. 1.5 stars for the second half. Averaged.)

My thanks to Blackstone Publishing for providing the DRC of “Don't Tell Me How To Die” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.