Hi everyone! Today I’m excited to participate in the blog tour for He Started It by Samantha Downing, hosted by Penguin(Michael Joseph).
He Started It by Samantha Downing
Publication date(hardcover): June 11th, 2020
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 400
Genre: Fiction, Thriller
Buy: BOOK DEPOSITORY | Wordery
Synopsis:
Beth, Portia, and Eddie Morgan haven’t all been together in years. And for very good reasons—we’ll get to those later. But when their wealthy grandfather dies and leaves a cryptic final message in his wake, the siblings and their respective partners must come together for a cross-country road trip to fulfill his final wish and—more importantly—secure their inheritance.
But time with your family can be tough. It is for everyone.
It’s even harder when you’re all keeping secrets and trying to forget a memory—a missing person, an act of revenge, the man in the black truck who won’t stop following your car—and especially when at least one of you is a killer and there’s a body in the trunk. Just to name a few reasons.
But money is a powerful motivator. It is for everyone.
– My Thoughts –
This is a batsh*t crazy story! Three siblings go on a road trip with their spouses(except one) and their prize at the end of the said trip: millions of dollars. Whatever could go wrong? Well, everything..
We have Eddie, Eddie’s wife, Beth, Beth’s husband, and Portia who’re embarking on a road trip using the exact route the siblings’ grandfather took when they were children. Their grandfather has stipulated in his will that if the siblings finish the trip(with two conditions), then they’ll be millionaires.
The kicker here is, of course, everyone’s hiding something. A secret so salacious, so horrifying that will add spice to the twists we encounter as the story progresses. Beth is our narrator and is probably a sociopath(which I deduced from psych 101 apparently); her focus is getting her inheritance and she’s willing to do ANYTHING for it. She’s our unreliable narrator, not a ‘heroine’, but a cheater as she reveals herself.
As the road trip goes on, Beth also transports us to the past, her childhood, to the time when she and her siblings were on a similar road trip with their grandfather. The road-trippers are on edge, not only because of the money involved, or their past, but someone’s following them as well.
The writing is really good with the pacing mirroring the characters’ journey. Some moments are so tense that you feel you’re in the story with these -possibly – psychotic characters. The ending left me unsettled, which is good, but I can’t help but think something was missing.
Overall, I would recommend this if you loved My Lovely Wife and would love to read a psychological thriller with an unreliable narrator & dangerous road trips.
Thanks to the publisher for gifting me an ARC in exchange for an honest review and for including me in the blog tour!
– About the Author –
Samantha Downing is the author of the Edgar Award-nominated novel My Lovely Wife. Amazon Studios and Nicole Kidman’s Blossom Films have partnered to produce a feature film based on the novel.
Her next book is called He Started It and will be released in 2020. She currently lives in New Orleans, where she is furiously typing away on her next novel.
Thank you for reading! Do you think you’ll read He Started It? Or, have you read My Lovely Wife? I’d love to your thoughts in the comments below!
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