Reviews with content warning for Toxic relationship - Murder in the Family

*** A copy of this book was kindly provided to me by Netgalley and HarperCollins in exchange for an honest review. Thank you! ***

WARNING: it's time for an unscheduled stop of the unpopular opinion train!!

Right... I didn't expect this to be happen to be honest. While it's true that I'm late to the whole DI Adam Fawley series and only read the first book earlier this year, I did love Cara Hunter's writing style. Add the fact that the blurb of Murder In The Family sounded absolutely fascinating with its true crime show and cold case angle, and I fully expected to have a fantastic time with this stand-alone. Imagine my surprise when I ended up wondering if I should just DNF more than once instead... Oh yes, Murder In The Family and me sadly didn't get along at all.

Before I continue, I have to say that I still love the premise of this story. In fact, this story sounded so up my alley that I fully expected to find a new 5 star read. I love a true crime and/or cold case angle, and the idea of having things unfold on live TV does sound exciting. My expectations for this story were high, and I have been looking forward to finally dive in ever since a copy appeared on my kindle. Especially since it promises to give you plenty of clues to try and solve the puzzle before the truth is revealed...

My initial excitement died down extremely fast though. Why? Let's just say that it has nothing to do with the content, and everything with the writing style. Boy, did I absolutely despise the way this story was written! Yes, I'm saying that it was the writing style that was mainly to blame for completely ruining this story for me. This basically reads like a literal transcript for a true crime Netflix show, where EVERYTHING is written out including the descriptions, tiniest gasps and facial expressions. I'm not sure why this bothered me to this point, because I've read and loved books with a similar format before (the Six Stories series comes to mind, although that series involves a podcast)... But the fact is that with the way this story was written, it's basically a miracle I didn't end up throwing my kindle against the wall.

To make things worse, Murder In The Family also throws a mountain of other formats at you (including e-mails, texts, newspaper articles, Tweets, maps etc.). This might work better in physical format, but on my kindle this was mainly just a visual overload and it slowed down the pace even more. Some texts were hard to read, and as a whole it not only distracted from what was going on, but it made the story feel less cohesive instead of dynamic. In fact, I started skimreading long before the halfway mark, not bothering with any of the inner background workings of the show nor the other formats at all. Instead I ended up reading just the transcript of the dialogues, and even then I struggled considerably to even make it to the final page. Yikes.

As for the plot: I still feel it has a lot of potential, but as a whole I wasn't completely convinced either. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that I guessed the identity of the person behind Luke's death almost immediately. I'm not sure if it's because I read to many crime thrillers or if it's really this easy to see, but I literally said I bet it's that person... Only to be extremely disappointed to find out I was actually right (basically, the only reason I kept reading was to see if I was wrong). There is also an overload of characters, and with the way the story is written, it's extremely hard to keep them apart or get to know them better. I didn't feel invested at all in learning more about any of them as a result either.

Whoops, this review is turning out be quite a rant... I'll just leave it at this and say that despite showing all the signs of the opposite, Murder In The Family most definitely wasn't for me. I sure wish I had just DNFed it instead... I know that I'm in the minority though, because most people do seem to love this story. But just in case there is someone out there with similar thoughts: you are not alone.

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