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Book: “A Twisted Love Story” by Samantha Downing
Publishing Info: Berkley, July 2023
Where Did I Get This Book: I received an eARC from NetGalley.
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: Wes and Ivy are madly in love. They’ve never felt anything like it. It’s the kind of romance people write stories about. But what kind of story? Because when it’s good, it’s great. Flowers. Grand gestures. Deep meaningful conversations where the whole world disappears. When it’s bad, it’s really bad. Vengeful fights. Damaged property. Arrest warrants.
But their vicious cycle of catastrophic breakups and head-over-heels reconnections needs to end fast. Because suddenly, Wes and Ivy have a common enemy–and she’s a detective.
There’s something Wes and Ivy never talk about–in good times or bad. The night of their worst breakup, when one of them took things too far, and someone ended up dead. If they can stick together, they can survive anything–even the tightening net of a police investigation.
Because one more breakup might just be their last…
Review: Thank you to NetGalley for sending me an eARC of this novel!
As we all know, I really enjoy books that have soap opera levels of drama, and if you have it happening within one of my preferred genres that’s all the better. This usually happens within thrillers, and I am far more likely to read one if it has some interpersonal dramatic nonsense to pad out and prolong the mystery and suspense. With all this in mind, “A Twisted Love Story” by Samantha Downing really caught my eye. The cover is pretty neat for one, and for another it promised two toxic people in an on again and off again relationship whose terrible romance led to something deadly. That just reeks of the kind of extra-ness that I love in a story. And I have also had luck with Samantha Downing in the past. So really I thought this was going to be a slam dunk. And, unfortunately, it was not.
But, as we always do, let’s start with the good. The premise definitely has a lot of promise, and there were things that I did like about it. I particularly liked it when we had a POV focus on the detective that is kind of keeping her eye on Wes and Ivy, Karen, as we get enough insight into her character to make her pretty fleshed out and interesting in her motives for doggedly pursuing cases that involve abusive relationships. Is it a unique insight? Not really. But it’s still fun to get into her mind and to see how this has become a bit of an obsession for her, and how her own experiences and biases can affect her ability to do her job to a certain extent.
But ultimately, I had a hard time getting through this book, and I think that the main reason for that was that Ivy and Wes are very, very unlikable, and not really in the kind of fun way that I look for in ‘people behaving badly’ books. At first I enjoyed seeing their weird egging each other on dynamic, but it was a pretty static relationship progression in that they were always really shitty to each other, and weren’t really fascinating or well rounded to make up for it. I do love a hot mess of a story, I will be the first to admit that, but Ivy and Wes just didn’t interest me. There wasn’t anything really ‘fun’ about their really toxic relationship, and I just had a hard time keeping interested mainly because not only were they difficult, the supporting characters weren’t really engaging either. And to make matters worse, the mystery itself wasn’t super enticing to me. I kind of figured out one of the twists pretty early on, and on top of that it just wasn’t very compelling of a mystery. We know that Wes and Ivy did something really bad during one of their toxic meltdowns and then never spoke of it again, but I wasn’t given much reason to really care about what it was because they were such trash people that the suspense wasn’t there.
And then there is also a random curveball thrown in that I couldn’t make heads or tails of as to why it happened. I don’t want to spoil anything and it was probably a way to keep the detective connected to Wes and Ivy, but it felt clumsily done. Overall, a lot of it fell pretty flat for me. Which is too bad because I definitely was enticed by the description!
So ultimately “A Twisted Love Story” wasn’t for me. I can appreciate a story of awful people doing awful things, but ya gotta give me a little bit of fun with that, and this one didn’t feel like a lot of fun.
Rating 5: Two reprehensible main characters and a kind of weak mystery made “A Twisted Love Story” less of a fun sudsy read and a bit more of a slog.
Reader’s Advisory:
“A Twisted Love Story” is included on the Goodreads list “2023 Mystery Thrillers Crime To Be Excited For”.
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