Carrie Lawrence wants a boring life. She has a job she likes and a boyfriend, and she would like nothing more than to marry him, buy a house, and maybe adopt a puppy. It seems like a simple enough dream. But she’s just not sure it’s meant to be for her. She has secrets.
Carrie lives in Brampton, a small town with an unusually high number of missing persons. One of those missing persons is her older sister Becca. Carrie has some notoriety in town because of her missing sister. She also has some notoriety for having survived the town’s famous serial killer, Footloose. Named because he liked to separate the foot from his victim, Footloose had kidnapped Carrie and taken her to his murder cabin. She had managed to escape, burning down the cabin as she went. But before she escaped, she heard another woman cry out, so Carrie rescued her as well.
Carrie was invited to attend a meeting of the Brampton Kill Seekers, a group of those with missing family members and true crime fans who are working together to figure out why so many people are missing in Brampton. Well, Carrie wasn’t so much invited as badgered, with emails coming in every day for two weeks to encourage her to go to the meeting. She had survived a serial killer. They think she might have information that could help them. But what they don’t know is that Carrie hadn’t survived a serial killer.
She’d survived two.
Her sister Becca had also been a psychopath. She’d tormented Carrie since she was a kid, and eventually started killing people. She had blackmailed Carrie to help her dispose the bodies, so now Carrie is involved in those killings. But nobody knows about Becca, except for Carrie. And now she’s missing. She may be dead, which would make Carrie’s life so much easier. She could maybe have that quiet, boring life of her dreams.
Unless the police find some of those bodies that Carrie helped Becca bury. Or if the Brampton Kill Seekers manage to break through to the truth. Carrie will need to pay attention to every detail if she wants to make it through her life without being in prison. After everything she went through with her sister and then with Footloose, does she have the strength to forge a new life for herself, or will she fall apart under the pressure?
I Told You This Would Happen is a dark thriller that has you swinging from goosebumps of fear to peals of laughter in an instant. The absurdity of Carrie’s situation grows as the twists come at her, and it’s stressful and hilarious at the same time. Fans of Samantha Downing will find a friend in author Elaine Murphy and their similar way of being dark and being laugh-out-loud funny at the same disturbing time.
This book is absolutely crazy-bananas. I could not stop reading it. It’s disturbing and weird and unexpected, but I loved every page. There is so much going on in this book, and I can’t talk about too much of it here. For one, I don’t want to give too much away. You probably think I have given a lot of away, what with talking about the two serial killers, but trust me, there is so much more to come in the story that I’ve barely scratched the surface.
And secondly, I’m not sure how to put into words the things I am thinking and feeling from this book. If you belong to a book club that is comfortable with gallows humor, this would be a great book to it around discussing. With wine. Lots of wine. And a cheese board. But mostly, wine. If you don’t have a dark book club to enjoy this with, read it with your best friend or the person you talk about your favorite true crime podcasts with. This is a good buddy read because it will leave you with things you want to say, and it will help to have someone you can turn to with those thoughts, someone with the same stunned look on their face and a new inability to say “Footloose” without giggling just a little.
Egalleys for I Told You This Would Happen were provided by Grand Central Publishing through NetGalley, with many thanks.
