The Serial Killer's Girl by L.H. Stacey

 
The Serial Killer's Girl by L.H. Stacey
My Rating: ★★★

I received a copy from Boldwood Books through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Lexi Jakes has been running from her past for a long time. Working as a journalist and currently living with her boyfriend and their daughter, hardly anyone knows that she’s the daughter of Peter Graves, a well-known convicted serial killer. Not even her boyfriend knows. Everything changes when the murder of her biological mother hits the news cycle. The clencher? Whoever did it is a Peter Graves copycat and they’re sending him a message.

We follow Lexi Jakes and the copycat killer whose identity isn’t revealed until later through rotating POV chapters. The most we know about the copycat killer for a long while is that they are the sister of Peter’s final victim. Other than knowing the copycat killer is unhinged right off the bat because they’re killing people, it’s clear that they are completely unhinged and not caring that the damage they’re doing is hurting everyone the same way she was hurt.

Meanwhile, Lexi spends a lot of time debating on whether or not she is going to tell her boyfriend about her past. When I say a lot of time, I mean majority of the book is her going back and forth on it. Once she’s run off to seek the safety of the family that took her in and gave her a loving and stable home, she needed to tell her boyfriend right away or just accept it was not happening. Unfortunately, that was not the case and we just watch her fear take on different appearances while she argues with herself about what she should do.

This book has a lot of good points. However, the suspense was barely there, and personally, it missed the mark on being a thriller. I’m most disappointed by the climax of the story being totally glossed over. We build up to this big event, Lexi makes here way there and understandably has cold feet, and then the next chapter starts and skips straight over the actual event. The climax is not finding out who the killer is, either, so the whole book fizzled out once it just skipped straight over this very important meeting. The pacing was very slow as well, which would’ve worked well if the suspense made it into the story.

That said, I really enjoyed some of the characters and the initial worldbuilding is excellent. I could really see Lexi’s life and her surroundings the whole way through. Because of this, I’m looking forward to what the author comes up with in the future because I think they are capable of writing a very good thriller. Everything was there to make it happen in this book, but it just missed the mark by a little bit.