Title: Love in the Time of Serial Killers
Author: Alicia Thompson
Publisher: Berkley 2022
Genre: Romance
Pages: 352
Rating: 3/5 stars
Reading Challenges: Unread Shelf; Read Around the USA - Florida
Where I Got It: Under the Cover, Kansas City, June 2024
Spice Rating: 4
PhD candidate Phoebe Walsh has always been obsessed with true crime. She's even analyzing the genre in her dissertation—if she can manage to finish writing it. It's hard to find the time while she spends the summer in Florida, cleaning out her childhood home, dealing with her obnoxiously good-natured younger brother, and grappling with the complicated feelings of mourning a father she hadn't had a relationship with for years.
It doesn't help that she's low-key convinced that her new neighbor, Sam Dennings, is a serial killer (he may dress business casual by day, but at night he's clearly up to something). It's not long before Phoebe realizes that Sam might be something much scarier—a genuinely nice guy who can pierce her armor to reach her vulnerable heart.
I grabbed this at the retreat last year hoping for a great witty, steamy, slightly dark romance. Instead, we got a very slow-moving, low-steam, traditional romcom romance. I couldn’t really connect to the pairing of Phoebe and Sam. They started out with a silly meet cute, but then went into a holding pattern for most of the book. The story is really focused more on Phoebe and her unease with her life than the romance aspect. It read more like women’s fiction than romance. And Phoebe grated on my at many points in the story. She was just a fairly unlikeable character. I really got bored about halfway through the book. I pushed through, but even the ending did not bring it back up for me.
Next up on the TBR pile:
