Review:
Saffy Huntley-Oliver is 12 years old when she drowns her stepfather in the pool where he'd been sexually abusing her since she was 5. He'd been preparing to start abusing Saffy's beloved younger sister, Susie, as well, and she absolutely could not let that happen.
Seventeen years later, Saffy is a gorgeous, wealthy, and outgoing socialite. She's still fiercely protective of her younger sister...who has no idea that Saffy is now an experienced serial killer who targets bad men. Lately, Saffy has found herself drawn to Jonathan Desrosiers, a successful true crime podcaster who genuinely believes in bringing justice to victims and closure to their families. He seems like a great guy. It's too bad he's married.
Jonathan has just wrapped up a signing for his book when he finds out that his wife is leaving him. As if that wasn't bad enough, he wakes up the next morning to find a garbage bag on his doorstep containing a chopped up body missing its head and hands. Jonathan is immediately reminded of the Bin Bag Killer. Unfortunately, his subsequent investigation and discoveries lead to him being scarred both physically and emotionally.
Will Saffy manage to overcome Jonathan's doubts about his work investigating and podcasting about true crime, Jonathan's lingering feelings for his soon-to-be ex-wife, the police suspecting Jonathan of murder, and creepy threats in order to achieve her very own storybook romance with a good guy?
This was a fun read, even though the source of the anonymous threats Jonathan was receiving was pretty obvious. Saffy was a charismatic and enjoyable heroine, despite being very much a killer. The book was low on gore, but Cohen still managed to make it pretty clear that Saffy was a scary woman who would do literally anything necessary to achieve her goals. This included putting a very sweet and trusting dog in peril. Some readers might not be able to get past this - I could deal with it because Saffy never did anything else to the dog, and the dog never trusted her again. Not even Jonathan seemed to be entirely safe - as much as Saffy professed to like him, I got the impression that he was always only one example of bad behavior away from becoming another one of Saffy's victims.
It was amusing, watching Saffy orchestrate things to turn herself into a romance heroine, complete with a meet cute, although I never quite managed to stop feeling nervous for Jonathan, who had no clue what he was dealing with. The weird little dance between Jonathan and Saffy helped make up for how predictable the suspense aspects felt.
All in all, I enjoyed this. It reminded me a bit of Butcher & Blackbird, except with much lower gore and heat levels, and the genre leaning more towards suspense/thriller than romance.
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