Book Review: "The Good Samaritan" by John Marrs

You’re going to hate me because you’re going to think I’m back on my thriller train and I can assure you I am trying to push against it. Once I start reading thrillers, I start reading them all and I don’t slow down. If you want to know what happened last time then just search up my ‘British Library Crime Classics’ reviews in the search tab. It got so bad that it was all I was reading for ages. Well, we are here with a book called ‘The Good Samaritan’ by John Marrs which I found because I follow some out of touch page on Facebook and it was mentioned briefly in the comments section. Yes, it was that out there. Let’s take a look at it shall we?

The book begins with Laura who is on the phone with a woman named Charlotte and a man named David. These are two different phone calls that aren’t connected to each other. These people have never met in their life and yet, they both jump from a cliff, taking their own lives.

Laura, on the other hand, works at ‘End of the Line’ - a ‘Samaritans’ like hotline for people in need of someone to talk to. The only problem is that instead of talking certain people out of suicide, she talks them into it. She hops across online message boards to look for new methods, victims and tips and tricks of the trade - she is a sociopath and a terrible human being. John Marrs got me hooked from the very beginning and honestly, the whole aspect of the story intrigued me so much I read the entire thing in a few hours of one night.

Laura also displays sociopathic behaviour towards her family, as we learn about her history though we find out she’s not entirely to blame herself. Yet, because she is the one narrating these parts I find her to be as reliable as meat is cheese. She logs into her daughter’s Facebook account and shares some ‘not safe for work’ pictures a boy has sent her to basically everyone on an anonymous account. She constantly thinks that her husband is no longer in love with her despite being ‘in love’ with him still. She’s an absent parent.

Also, there’s something about a fire and a son that I’m not going to say too much about because it’s part of a spoiler. Marrs definitely knows how to make you question yourself because you know you’re getting all of this information from a woman who shouldn’t be trusted to put a scrunched up paper in the paper bin let alone be trusted with people’s lives and with children. He creates a kaleidoscope of sociopathy the more we learn about her life. She becomes the portrait of a woman constantly plotting, constantly looking for something else to make sure she has the most power in the situation.

Laura’s childhood might have been pretty weird and somewhat traumatising, but there is another person in this story and his name is Ryan. Ryan is trying to figure things out. We learn about his life and how he was raised, we get to see that he was going to buy a house. But there are unanswered questions he requires to be answered before something bad happens. Let’s just put it this way: something bad does happen. A lot of bad things happen. When Laura turns up at a house covered in pictures of herself, she understands that there are more things than meet the eye about this man, but what will truly happen here and who is Ryan really? I will leave that for you to find out.

Alongside this, we also meet a young woman named Effie. Effie is the teen daughter of Laura and starts to uncover things she was never meant to uncover. There’s murder in the mix and when Laura’s husband confronts a man named Johnny, things become even wilder. John Marrs definitely gets a lot of characters into this fairly short book, and yet nothing feels like it has just been shoehorned in. There are many twists and turns here and I’ll tell you this: you will never ever see this ending coming.

All in all, I loved this book so much that I am trying to prevent myself from going on a thriller binge. But I guess you will have to wait and see whether I turn or not.