True Crime Tuesday: The Nine Million Dollar Murder

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It’s been a while!

Sorry for the break! But not really. I hope you stumbled across many other funny and wonderful book bloggers and true crime writers to fill the Krystin-shaped hole in your heart. I know there are so many writers to read, and it means a lot to me that you still stick around my blog even when I disappear every now and again.

I’ve been super fucking busy at home trying to finish my bedroom renovation. I know, I know. I’ve been promising forever to post my basement reno and I’ve already moved on to my bedroom. What can I say? I don’t possess a lot of virtues, and patience definitely isn’t one of the few.

I finished painting on Sunday and I’m so happy to say there are no more rooms in my house that require a full wall of paint… three years later. I fucked up my shoulder once again and my back is twisted, but all the heavy, big projects are officially done and now I can just focus on the smaller details like hanging a mirror or putting up curtains.

I can’t tell you how excited I am to just sit on my fucking ass and do nothing once again. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. And it looks a lot like me in bed with a book and a snuggly puppy. And of course, writing more posts around here. I fucking swear it!

Truly, my Fitbit has never seen me achieve so many steps before. It thinks someone new is wearing it.

Anyway, I’m feeling a little bit less stressed, my brain fog is clearing and my creative juices are totally pumping… forgive me for saying “creative juices.” That phrase could not be any more disgusting. But I digress… a new true crime story is just breaking within the last couple of days, and it is completely fucked up and sensational and has me rolling my eyes in all kinds of directions because goddamn teenagers are just so fucking stupid, cruel sometimes.

We’re talking terrible teenagers. We’re talking murder. We’re talking child pornography. We’re talking fake millionaires. We’re talking being gullible as fuck.

This is the murder of Cynthia Hoffman.

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Review: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

“Fear…is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.”

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★★

Viking | 1959

Opening Spooky: THERE ARE TOO MANY DOORS

Main Character: Was crazy before she got there.

Plot Scary-ness: Underwhelming boos

The first time I ever came across this story was in 1999 when I was 14 years old and watched The Haunting for the first time.

Is it a good movie? Not really, but Catherine Zeta-Jones and Liam Neeson in a murderous, haunted house? That’s always going to be a yes from me. And that scene where Owen Wilson gets his head lobbed off? Scared the shit out of me twenty years… TWENTY YEARS AGO?! Omg. *vomits in mouth*

So, there’s some nostalgia linked to this for me in terms of shitty 90s horror movies that I still have a fondness for.

I later saw the original 1963 adaptation which just didn’t really work for me because I was just a dumbass teenager with a myopic view of entertainment and a shitty attitude.

In 2001, Scary Movie 2 pulled heavily from The Haunting and it has been seared into my brain ever since.

In fact, while I was reading this I suddenly had a desire to watch Scary Movie 2, so I did, and that was arguably a bad idea because for the rest of the book all I could picture was Chris Elliot with his gross tiny fucking hand.

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Say what you want about quality, but the moronic movie is funny as hell.

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Review: The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen

I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.

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★★★½

St. Martin’s Press | 2018

Opening Hook: Wife turned ex turned stalker

Main Character: Like a baby deer learning how to walk, but after being gaslit by a psychopath

Plot Twisty-ness: More wavy, less twisty.

This book is the direction that The Last Mrs. Parrish should have gone instead of being the misogynistic piece of garbage it turned out to be. I don’t know why everyone likes that book so much, or why it’s being made into a movie, but I’m very disappointed in each and every one of you who back it as a good book. And I’m telling your fucking parents. Don’t @ me.

The Wife Between Us doesn’t fully realize it’s potential as a domestic thriller in a way that was satisfying to me. While the quite and calculating approach the authors seem to prefer worked really well in Hendrick’s and Pekkanen’s other novel An Anonymous Girl, here it made the narrative less thrilling and more soap opera-ish than I would have wanted.

Where The Last Mrs. Parrish tried to convince the reader that domestic abuse is okay as long as the “replacement wife” fucking sucks enough to “deserve” it, this book pumped the breaks before completely going in that direction. Instead, there is a moment of, “Oopsie! I guess it wasn’t very nice of me to make that woman take my place in my abusive relationship.”

You think?!

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Review: The Fact of a Body – A Murder and a Memoir by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

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★★

Flatiron Books | 2017

I really wanted to like this. I didn’t want to write a negative review for a book that is, in part, detailing the author’s personal experience with molestation.

The heavy subject matter makes a negative review seem tacky, to a degree. And I didn’t want to be that asshole. But, that’s not where this review is coming from. At all.

I applaud the author’s use of writing to work through her trauma and to find an understanding of how trauma shaped her. If this book was a tool for personal peace (which I suspect it was,) then really, any negative review means nothing in the grand scheme of that healing.

But, I am a reader and book reviewer and so I’ll be honest about my reading experience, as I always am, beyond the personal aspects Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich bravely shares.

The Fact of a Body weaves two true life events. One: the re-trial of Ricky Langley, a confessed pedophile who was sentenced to death in 1992 for the murder of his 6-year-old neighbour, Jeremy Guillory. In 2003, he was awarded a new trial. The intention of his attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, was to reduce Langley’s death sentence down to life in prison. Clive the Lawyer runs a law firm which specializes in Death Row cases and he is staunchly anti-capital punishment, taking on many cases where the intention is only ever to reduce the sentence, not to prove innocence.

The author begins an internship at Smith’s law firm at the same time the re-trial is starting. During her orientation, Alexandria is shown Langley’s ’92 confession where he talks about his sexual attraction to children and what he did to Jeremy Guillory.

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My Favorite Murder Mentioned My Blog and I’m Losing My Fucking Mind.

OKAY, Okay.

OKAY.

OMFG OKAY.

I need to take a breath and chill.

I feel like I have to pee even though I just peed. But I keep remembering what happened to me today and then I need to pee again.

Y’ALL.

KAREN FUCKING KILGARIFF READ. MY. BLOG.

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True Crime Tuesday: Bobby Joe Long

We had a 3-day weekend in Canada to celebrate Queen Victoria’s birthday. That badass bitch is long dead and I don’t even know how old she’d be at this point, but honestly, most people just use it as an excuse to drink and watch fireworks. It’s commonly referred to as “May 2-4,” (as in a case of beer) and I’m not complaining about an extra day off.

I’m not really a beer and fireworks kind of girl, so my time looks like any other day off, but with scrambling for groceries because everything is going to be closed thrown in to make things interesting. You’d think people were expecting the end of the world to come with how busy Costco gets the day before a stat holiday.

Another little bonus this weekend was that my husband and I had the house to ourselves for the first time in a long time. We capitalized on this by showering with the door open, walking around without pants on and ordering a bunch of food that we didn’t need to share with anyone else, except for the dog.

Believe Me: The Abduction of Lisa McVey (2018)

On Sunday afternoon, after I’d finished my book and changed out of my leggings into a new pair of leggings, I turned on Lifetime and indulged in made-for-TV-movie goodness. I happened to find one titled, Believe Me: The Abduction of Lisa McVey.

It said based on a true story. It said serial killer. I was 100% sold.

So, speaking of badass bitches…. girl. For real. Lisa McVey is a true warrior queen and I’m so glad I watched this movie about her ordeal at the hands of serial killer, Bobby Joe Long. She was abducted and raped for a 26-hour-period when she was 17-years-old.

Having suffered long-term abuse throughout her life, mostly at the hands of her grandmother’s boyfriend, McVey says she tapped in the “survivor skills” she’d cultivated in order to overcome her captor, not physically, “but psychologically.” McVey said: “It worked. I’m still here.”

Lisa McVey is the only survivor of a serial killer who hunted in the Tampa Bay area, abducting, raping and murdering at least 10 women in 1984. The details she provided to the police are directly responsible for Long’s arrest.

I did a little research while I was watching the movie. One of my questions was why is this movie on now? Could there be a reason to shed light on McVey’s story this weekend? The answer is that Bobby Joe Long is scheduled to be executed by the state of Florida this coming Thursday, May 23rd.

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Review: The Homecoming by Andrew Pyper

“When mom called to tell me the news, I was surprised at first that Raymond Quinlan was capable of something so human as dying.”

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★★★★

Simon & Schuster | 2019

Opening Hook: Daddy had secrets.

Main Character: A normal guy wearing a good guy suit.

Plot Twisty-ness: Lost in the woods without a sense of direction.

I’m a huge fan of Blake Crouch. And this book by Andrew Pyper is giving me some serious Crouch vibes and I’m not mad about it. This is the first book I’ve read by Pyper but it probably won’t be my last. The Homecoming was pretty much the shit if you’re into dark thrillers with a horror-sci-fi undertone.

The Quinlan family has lost their patriarch, the mysterious and absent Raymond Quinlan. He was a workaholic who left his children – Aaron, Franny and the youngest, Bridge – with some daddy issues. But all his work and bad parenting also left behind a few million in assets, so how bad can an absent father really be in that case?

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Belfountain is a huge estate in the PNW that includes cabins, a lodge and an old Christian summer camp on the grounds. It’s worth a cool thirty million in the right market conditions and it technically now belongs to the remaining Quinlans, But, in order for them to get their hands on their cut of their father’s will, they have to agree to spend 30 days on the estate, with no contact to the outside world.

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Review: The Missing Ones (Detective Lottie Parker, #1) by Patricia Gibney

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★★★½

Opening Hook: Church will kill you.

Main Character: Drunky McHypocrite

Plot Twisty-ness: You never know what Priests are up to.

My endless struggle to catch up on NetGalley arcs continues with this book I received in January of 2017.

Seriously I’m just the fucking worst. Please don’t leave me!

The Missing Ones wasn’t the worst. But it wasn’t great either…

First of all, it’s way too long considering the substance of the story which is pretty typical and occasionally flat, albeit mixed with moments that were kind of disturbing. Consider this your warning for baby murder.

Detective Lottie Parker is heading up a team looking for a killer who has killed a woman in a church and tried to make another man’s death look like a suicide. The deaths are all connected in some way to a former Catholic children’s home, St. Angela’s, that is disturbing as fuck as one would expect a religious children’s home to be. There’s a land developer involved, some business partners and a few shady priests.

I mean, in a nutshell, you could say the theme of this book is: Catholics really know how to fuck people up.

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A “Here’s The Fucking Twist” Giveaway!

Attention booknerds! If you’re not following me over on my #bookstagram account – @thefuckingtwist – then, first of all, how dare you?

Second of all, I don’t mean that. You do you do, booboo. I get that you don’t need me in your life on every social media platform. I mean, not even my husband does.

But, if you’re not following me on Insta, I don’t want you to miss out on the new giveaway I’ve set up to celebrate spring and my complete indifference to follower-count milestones!

If it makes you feel any better about following me, I don’t post all the fucking time like some of these other more organized and better managed accounts. So follow me for unpredictable posting, cursing and my signature mix of feminine meets goddamn murder and mayhem.

Okay, onto the giveaway!

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Save Me From Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin, #1) by S.A. Lelchuk

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★★★½

Flatiron Books | 2019

Opening Hook: Pool cues and brass knuckles

Main Character: Guilt-plaguing with tight jeans and a purpose

Plot Twisty-ness: A little off the Silicon Valley rails, and I don’t mean cocaine.

I was committed and ready, and completely open, to falling head over heels in love with Nikki Griffin, bookseller and badass P.I. with some serious anger issues.

But, unfortunately, this didn’t totally live up to everything I wanted it to be. Call it a victim of my high expectations if you want, but I found this to be a just okay, middle-of-the-road thriller.

The star highlight for me is the main character of Nikki Griffin. I think she was complicated but real. She came with a dark backstory and a closed-off, tough-as-nails personality that didn’t slip away the moment she met a guy. For being a novel written by a man, I was pleased to find she didn’t talk about how her nipples felt or looked at any moment, since that seems to be a thing male writers are typically preoccupied with when writing female leads. Any comments that she makes about her body seemed to me to be in relation to men looking at her and their sexual thoughts, and were less about sexually describing herself.

The way Nikki is introduced is pretty canon the whole way through the novel. She likes privacy, but she’s not dead inside. She keeps things close to the chest, but isn’t afraid to be vulnerable with the people she trusts. She’s strong, smart and professionally violent. All things I probably am, but just way less cool about it. Like, I daydream about breaking a man’s arm for hitting a woman, but really I just eat cookies about it.

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