{"id":7136,"date":"2026-07-20T06:01:28","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T13:01:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=7136"},"modified":"2026-07-20T06:01:28","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T13:01:28","slug":"sarah-lotz-how-to-kill-a-crime-writer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/sarah-lotz-how-to-kill-a-crime-writer\/","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Lotz: How to Kill a Crime Writer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I was of two minds on this novel.\u00a0 I enjoyed the main character, Niamh, who has just lost her mother and who has moved into her mother\u2019s remote cottage in the English countryside.\u00a0 She has a cat, Brian, but mostly she is (not) dealing with her grief by sofa surfing and playing video games. She is startled out of her \u201cgrief journey\u201d (as her stepmother refers to it) by the appearance of the main character in her author mother\u2019s books.\u00a0 Her mother had written thrillers featuring someone I can only describe as a female Jack Reacher, differing in gender and in that she has a fixed place of abode.<\/p>\n

The appearance of this character, Leah, is more than startling, obviously.\u00a0 Is she a ghost? Is she an apparition? Is she a figment of Niamh\u2019s tortured psyche?\u00a0 Whatever Leah is, she manages to pull Niamh off the sofa.\u00a0 Her mother\u2019s death had occurred when she took a fall from a ladder while fixing the gutter.\u00a0 While this seemed unlike her mother, Niamh has accepted her death as an accident, and it\u2019s Leah who suggests it might in fact be a murder.<\/p>\n

She can\u2019t find the ladder her mother fell off and she can\u2019t find her mother\u2019s phone and so with Leah\u2019s push, she decides to investigate.\u00a0 She begins, naturally, with her neighbors \u2013 the next door former cop, devoted to his garden to an obsessive degree; the titled and reclusive elderly lady and her niece; and someone she refers to as \u201cThe Wanker,\u201d a wealthy young guy who uses his restored farmhouse on the weekends, leaving his obscenely large vehicle in everyone\u2019s way.<\/p>\n

As she gets to know the neighbors to a degree, she also begins to look inside her mother\u2019s bookish world \u2013 and ends up chasing leads to a book conference and to a son of another mysteriously dead thriller writer.\u00a0 What was good about this book was the character of Niamh and, in fact, her grief journey, though she refuses to refer to it in those terms.\u00a0 Her grief is real, raw, and believable.<\/p>\n

The other strong point, though it was weird, was the character of Leah, who pushes Niamh and gets her through some tough spots with a click of her virtual zippo lighter.\u00a0 When Niamh is in danger of breaking down and letting loose the always threatening floods of tears, a click of Leah\u2019s lighter rights her and she\u2019s able to push on (mostly).\u00a0 This messy character study was appealing.\u00a0 Niamh was even annoyingly human in her ceaseless yet completely understandable grief for her mother.<\/p>\n

What wasn\u2019t as strong was the actual plot, which is meander-y and often gets off track.\u00a0 As someone closer to Niamh\u2019s mother\u2019s age I was somewhat fascinated, somewhat charmed, and somewhat exasperated by Niamh\u2019s millennial behavior.\u00a0 She\u2019s never heard of Columbo or V.I. Warshawski \u2013 but she has heard of Jack Reacher.\u00a0 Made me feel old, though also wishing I could reach through the pages and share a bit of experience with her.<\/p>\n

I will say the ending twist was quite well done and quite unexpected, and I applauded Niamh\u2019s refusal to be a lame damsel in distress.\u00a0 Say what you will about millennials, they are pretty fierce, as they must be to deal with the world of the moment.\u00a0 So a big hand for the characters, a hand for the mind bendy use of Leah as a character, and a bit of a miss for the wobbly plot.\u00a0 —\u00a0Robin Agnew<\/em><\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was of two minds on this novel.\u00a0 I enjoyed the main character, Niamh, who has just lost her mother and who has moved into her mother\u2019s remote cottage in the English countryside.\u00a0 She has a cat, Brian, but mostly she is (not) dealing with her grief by sofa surfing and playing video games. She … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1057,189,136,2555,1276,2554,1571],"class_list":["post-7136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-amateur-sleuth","tag-berkley","tag-british-village","tag-how-to-kill-a-crime-writer","tag-robin-agnew","tag-sarah-lotz","tag-slight-paranormal-element"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7138,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7136\/revisions\/7138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}