Book Review: Murder Road by Simone St. James

 

After picking up a hitchhiker on a deserted road, young newlyweds April and Eddie soon find themselves haunted by a string of unsolved murders.

The premise of this book was such an interesting one that I really couldn't wait to get into it. Before I opened the book, I thought it would make a great movie or series based on the description alone. I really liked another of the author's books, The Sun Down Motel, so this was on my list immediately!

Unfortunately the actual story was a bit disappointing.

But it was great that we get into things right away. The characters are picking up the hitchhiker in maybe the first chapter and that first section is really intriguing and genuinely creepy.

Then from here, things start to go downhill.

Rather than staying with the scares and creepiness, the story pivots to 'the police think our heroes are the killers', and it stays here for way too long. I get why it went in this direction, it definitely made the story feel more authentic, but it continued for way longer than it needed to and became too repetitive.

The characters are kept at a distance from the reader, and this makes sense because it's said over and over again that both characters are keeping secrets. But because we don't get to know the characters, it takes a lot to make us actually care about them - and worse than that, the secrets they're keeping aren't that huge anyway. One is basically nothing and the other is quite predictable.

But this distance also doesn't work because we don't really know anyone outside of the main characters, it makes it harder to be interested in the mystery.

The other reason the mystery is so hard to be interested in is because it happened years ago to characters we don't know, only affects characters we don't know, was done by a character we don't know, and our main characters are only involved after a certain point because they're actively choosing to be, and it's really hard to see why.

And in addition to that, because the story is so vast, the characters almost don't matter to the plot anyway.

I really wish the premise had focused on the singular incident with the hitchhiker rather than expanding to the unsolved murders. It made what was quite a contained, interesting story unnecessarily big and more distant.

I also think I probably would have preferred if it weren't a ghost story in this way, without spoiling it, but that's mostly just personal preference.

So overall I'm a much bigger fan of The Sun Down Motel. This one wasn't really for me, which is so disappointing because I loved the description!

2.5/5