Deeply disturbing, but utterly gripping ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
She’s a friendly voice on the phone. But can you trust her?
The people who call End of the Line need hope. They need reassurance that life is worth living.
But some are unlucky enough to get through to Laura. Laura doesn’t want them to hope. She wants them to die.
Laura hasn’t had it easy: she’s survived sickness and a difficult marriage only to find herself heading for forty, unsettled and angry. She doesn’t love talking to people worse off than she is. She craves it.
But now someone’s on to her—Ryan, whose world falls apart when his pregnant wife ends her life, hand in hand with a stranger. Who was this man, and why did they choose to die together?
The sinister truth is within Ryan’s grasp, but he has no idea of the desperate lengths Laura will go to…
Because the best thing about being a Good Samaritan is that you can get away with murder.
If nothing else, this book would get the award for having the most heinous female protagonist ever (well, at least since I read Misery - yep, we are in the realms of Annie Wilkes’ levels of cray cray here...) But it has a hell of a lot more going on then that.
Its not giving anything away to allude to the fact that the main character, Laura, works on a suicide hotline (helpline ...?) but is using it in the most horrific way to get her own kicks. I’ll just state now that if you’re depressed, sensitive to the subject of suicide, or had a loved one take their own life.....you might just want to give this one a miss. Because there’s quite a lot of talk about it - and there is NO skirting around the issue. We get a lot of the gnarly details about methods....look, just be warned and go into this book aware of that.
On the other hand if you like a book to go so dark you need your own miners lamp to look for any glimmer of hope, then this is for you! Disclaimer - I’m not a horrible person (I’m not, I swear) but as someone who loves psychological thrillers, the premise of a woman working on a suicide hotline and actually encouraging people to end their own lives was morbidly fascinating. What a clever premise for a thriller. I mean, it doesn't get much more macabre than that. You just knew Laura was going to have such a grisly back story to have ended up that way, and oh boy did she!
I found the build up of this book just a little too drawn out for my liking and I was just starting to lose interest a tad when we meet Ryan. Ryan is left distraught when his pregnant girlfriend takes her own life. The ONLY thing you see coming in this book is that he traces her mysterious suicide back to Laura - but all the other plot twists from then on are so cleverly crafted. After that frustratingly slow build, I had been caught, hook, line and sinker and I couldn’t stop reading. I’ve seen a few Goodreads reviews giving this a DNF after about 50 pages - my advice is stick with it, because it’s about to get soooooo good.
This is the first book I have read by this author and was more than pleasantly surprised. The characters were completely believable and I loved how carefully the story had been interwoven so you are drip fed more and more of the back story and slowly things start to make sense.
I did feel like I needed a big hug after reading this though, ... and a hot chocolate, and a rom com..... and a room full of puppies. I mean, it is intensely dark and there is no real relief throughout. But if that is your cup of tea, then this is an excellent, suspenseful thriller that you will not be able to put down.
Just make sure to have some chocolate on standby for afterwards.
I received a copy of the book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review