Book: “He Started It” by Samantha Downing
Publishing Info: Berkley, July 2020
Where Did I Get This Book: I was sent an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
Book Description: Beth, Portia, and Eddie Morgan haven’t all been together in years. And for very good reasons—we’ll get to those later. But when their wealthy grandfather dies and leaves a cryptic final message in his wake, the siblings and their respective partners must come together for a cross-country road trip to fulfill his final wish and—more importantly—secure their inheritance.
But time with your family can be tough. It is for everyone.
It’s even harder when you’re all keeping secrets and trying to forget a memory—a missing person, an act of revenge, the man in the black truck who won’t stop following your car—and especially when at least one of you is a killer and there’s a body in the trunk. Just to name a few reasons.
But money is a powerful motivator. It is for everyone.
Review: Thanks to Berkley and NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of this novel!
Even though it got a lot of hype when it came out, I never actually read “My Lovely Wife” by Samantha Downing. I’m not sure why it never made it to my hold list, but for whatever reason it just hasn’t been on my book stack. But given all the buzz it has, when Berkley sent me a link to Downing’s newest book, “He Started It”, I was pleasantly surprised and delighted. And the description alone was enough to get my hyped: feuding siblings, a missing person, family secrets, and a mysterious potential stalker? That just screams something that I would want to read about! As someone who used to go on family road trips all the time throughout her childhood, sometimes to the point where everyone in the car wanted to murder each other, that was the icing on the cake!
“He Started It” is from the perspective of Beth, one of three dysfunctional siblings who are on a road trip in hopes of collecting an inheritance from their recently deceased grandfather. When we first meet these siblings, all we know are that 1) they aren’t really close to each other, and 2) this road trip is a re-creation of a trip they took with said grandfather when they were kids, and if they want to get their money, they have to do it. As we get to know Beth, siblings Eddie and Portia, and Beth and Eddie’s spouses Felix and Krista, we find we are following a group of very unlikable people who have a lot of secrets. And while the characters themselves are all pretty reprehensible, the road trip they take is incredibly fun, mostly because the secrets start coming out and you just have to know more. As Downing slowly shows us what happened on the childhood road trip, and slowly starts to reveal facts and details that are more and more salacious as time goes on, you find yourself completely hooked into what happened to these siblings and what motivates them in the present day. As mentioned, we are mostly getting into Beth’s head, so it’s hard to know how reliable she is and what kind of picture we’re getting, but all that is just part of the salacious fun as more well crafted twists come out of the woodwork. And almost all of the big reveals and shocks feel well earned too. And while none of the characters were enjoyable, I still wanted to know what happened to them because I wanted to know if they would all get what was coming to them. Suffice to say, I devoured this book in a very short time, and really had to force myself to put it down when I had other things to do.
In spite of how freakin’ addicted I was to this book, I will say that the ending threw a wrench into my overall experience of it. I’m not going to spoil anything for you guys, because up until that point I had a really fun time and I still think it’s worth the read. But what I will say is that it felt abrupt, it felt unresolved, and it felt a bit like a shocker just for the sake of being shocking. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, per se, but it did mean that this book never really moved from ‘mindless fun thriller’ to ‘you gotta read this book, thriller fans of all ages!’ That’s not a bad thing when you want to bring a stack of books to your backyard escape. But it may not stand out too much from other stories in that stack.
“He Started It” was fun in the moment, and as someone who is trying to live more for the moment, I was thankful for it as I was reading it.
Rating 7: Though the ending kind of throws the whole thing off, “He Started It” is a fun and kind of salacious thriller that will take your attention and refuse to return it until you’ve finished.
Reader’s Advisory:
“He Started It” is included on the Goodreads lists “Psychological Suspense for 2020 (U.S. Publications Jan-July 2020)”, and “Books Featured on First Chapter Fun”.
Find “He Started It” at your library using WorldCat, or a local independent bookstore using IndieBound!
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