Stevie‘s review of Good Girls Don’t Die by Christina Henry
Horror Suspense published by Berkley 14 Nov 23
I’m a great fan of cosy mysteries and have been known to enjoy both horror stories and Young Adult dystopias, so this novel’s premise certainly intrigued me. The story opens with Celia, also a fan of cosy mysteries, going about her day with the nagging feeling that this isn’t her life and that there is something very fake about the small town everyone tells her is her home. The feelings intensify when an annoying neighbour is found dead, with Celia as the chief suspect, and it slowly dawns on Celia the man claiming to be her husband is actually holding her prisoner.
Celia makes a bid for freedom, evading a group of mysterious figures in order to do so, and we leave her story for the time being to be introduced to Allie, a college student planning a birthday trip with her two friends. Things start to go wrong when both friends bring their new boyfriends with them, and it get worse when the boys decide the trip should be to a remote cabin rather than to a beach. Allie quickly realises she’s ended up in the plot of a horror story, but none of her companions will listen, and soon they start to fall victim to a very generic killer for no apparent reason. Allie tries to break out of her story, and we leave her at much the same point we left Celia, so we can meet Maggie.
Maggie is under no illusion that she and the women she finds herself with have been kidnapped and is pretty sure she knows who is responsible in her case. The women are all informed that they must comply with their captors’ wishes or bad things will happen to a loved one. They are then forced to take part in a series of challenges not all of them will survive. Again, Maggie eventually turns the tables on the unseen people behind her ordeal, and this time she joins forces with Celia and Allie to figure out where they are, who has brought them there, and how they are going to get home.
I have multiple issues with this story. Firstly, none of the three plots within a plot are particularly good examples of their genre. This is most jarring in the case of Celia’s story, mostly because that’s the one I was expecting the most from. Secondly, the set-up to the main/background plot felt a little too implausible, even for a horror-suspense story, and relied too much on the trope of ‘all men are bastards’ to be truly satisfying. Finally (possibly as a result of that last observation,) the pay-off felt even less plausible, and I couldn’t stop wondering what would happen to these women when they tried to return to their old lives or if, indeed, they ever could.
Overall, not really my kind of book, although it may appeal to readers who prefer horror and/or suspense to cosy mysteries.
Grade: C
Summary:
Celia wakes up in a house that’s supposed to be hers. There’s a little girl who claims to be her daughter and a man who claims to be her husband, but Celia knows this family—and this life—is not hers…
Allie is supposed to be on a fun weekend trip—but then her friend’s boyfriend unexpectedly invites the group to a remote cabin in the woods. No one else believes Allie, but she is sure that something about this trip is very, very wrong…
Maggie just wants to be home with her daughter, but she’s in a dangerous situation and she doesn’t know who put her there or why. She’ll have to fight with everything she has to survive…
Three women. Three stories. Only one way out. This captivating novel will keep readers guessing until the very end.
Read an excerpt.
