My Rating

All those mystery-thriller fans looking around for a unique read are gonna love The Family Plot. The story is as freakish as freakish gets. Holy moly, if there ever was a weird and unorthodox family like The Lighthouses near me, I would probably be like the islanders running scared away from them.

Seeped and inundated with true crime, the bizarre and unorthodox upbringing of the Lighthouse children creates goosebumps. The description of the island and the dark presence of the Blackburn killer induces a sinister and gothic vibe, though I didn’t get the menacing and creepy aura that I was expecting going in. The house filled with the history of true crime was scarier to think about but again the extremely terrifying feeling that should have been felt never came across.

Dahlia’s search for the truth of her twin’s murder explodes into a frenzy of secrets tumbling out of the closet which made for some compulsive reading. I just couldn’t put the book down and it is quite an impressive feat by the author to have devised a plot that feels over the top and implausible but still produces a roller coaster ride with twists and turns causing the pages to be flipped at an alarming rate. It would have been interesting to see more details about the mother; to be someone so obsessed and adamant about true crimes, force-feeding her children to learn them exhaustively, re-enacting the crimes, and conducting prayer rituals in memory of the victims, she seems just a shadow of a character as the story progresses.

The Family Plot may not seem feasible at one go, there’s a heavy dose of true murders being mentioned and Megan Collins follows the technique of telling the reader the ghastly ways of the Lighthouse family instead of letting the readers decipher certain things which may be a dampener for many but didn’t spoil my reading fun though it made me less involved in the story.

4.5 stars for this addictive page-turner.

When a family obsessed with true crime gathers to bury their patriarch, horrifying secrets are exposed upon the discovery of another body in his grave in this chilling novel from the author of Behind the Red Door and The Winter Sister .

At twenty-six, Dahlia Lighthouse has a lot to learn when it comes to the real world. Raised in a secluded island mansion deep in the woods and kept isolated by her true crime-obsessed parents, she has spent the last several years living on her own, but unable to move beyond her past—especially the disappearance of her twin brother Andy when they were sixteen.

With her father’s death, Dahlia returns to the house she has avoided for years. But as the rest of the Lighthouse family arrives for the memorial, a gruesome discovery is made: buried in the reserved plot is another body—Andy’s, his skull split open with an ax.

Each member of the family handles the revelation in unusual ways. Her brother Charlie pours his energy into creating a family memorial museum, highlighting their research into the lives of famous murder victims; her sister Tate forges ahead with her popular dioramas portraying crime scenes; and their mother affects a cheerfully domestic façade, becoming unrecognizable as the woman who performed murder reenactments for her children. As Dahlia grapples with her own grief and horror, she realizes that her eccentric family, and the mansion itself, may hold the answers to what happened to her twin.

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