The heroine of The Family Plot is called Dahlia, after The Black Dahlia. Her brother, Charlie, is the namesake of Charles Lindbergh, who was kidnapped and murdered as a baby. Older sister Tate is named after Sharon Tate, famous victim of Charles Manson. And her twin Andy, from the father of killer Lizzie Borden.
You might be wondering what kind of psychopath would choose names for their darling babies amidst such horror and cruelty. Dahlia’s mother is a “special” soul – obsessed with the murder of her parents, she raised her children on a steady diet of victimology, true crime stories, dead body reenactments and charming details like someone being shot in the head and their brain looking like a “roast chicken” on the floor. Settled on an island that is also home to a famous serial offender, The Blackburn Killer, who dumps women onto beaches wearing ice-blue dresses and with branded ankles – the kids grow up mired in the muck of crime scenes, with more knowledge of victims’ names and birth dates than they do of the periodic table or Shakespeare.
Suffice to say, this isn’t the Brady Bunch, and all the children flew the coop as soon as was humanly possible – with Andy being the most mysterious.
Dahlia’s been searching for her beloved twin since he left in the dead of night, over a decade earlier. But when she returns to the family home for her father’s funeral, a grisly discovery is made – Andy’s skeleton, the fractured skull split apart by an ax. Andy is suddenly not just a ghost on a Sri Lankan beach or a face in the crowd in Paris – he’s truly gone, not to be found on social media or a message board or by combing the streets of nearby cities. Dahlia is set adrift by the news, and deep in mourning, she begins to try to piece together what exactly happened to her brother. In doing so, she stumbles upon evidence that The Blackburn Killer might be closer than anyone ever dreamed…
The Family Plot was the first novel I read by Megan Collins. The premise is wonderful. I love listening to true crime podcasts (“The Murder Squad” is my favourite) and armchair detectives are actually out there solving cases these days – combing through evidence with the kind of meticulousness that most exhausted, overworked detectives just don’t have the time or manpower for these days.
My main sticking point here is that the characters are utterly irredeemable. There wasn’t one person I was rooting for in the entire sorry bunch. Dahlia is a wet rag. Charlie is an obnoxious drunk. Tate is infuriating and more concerned with her Instagram art than her sister’s obvious grief. Their mother – I mean, where do I begin here? She needs serious, serious help. I also – with the exception of Tate – didn’t find any of them believable as actual human beings.
Toward the end, the revelations come in thick and fast, and I felt the main, overarching theme was lost – the victims. The women who were murdered for someone else’s sadistic pleasure. They are just blobs in an image or stick figures in one of Tate’s dioramas. None of the characters seemed to feel genuine grief over what had happened to them, and genuine horror at who had contributed to their suffering and the abrupt cleaving of their lives.
So while The Family Plot was entertaining at times, I couldn’t feel any of the gravitas I had hoped for. There was a real chance for the author to “honour” the victims the way that the family purported to do all of their lives, but as it turns out, their prayers were just soap bubbles, amounting to nothing more than empty words, floating away into the sea and sky.
Thank you to NetGalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review. Appreciate it!
doves falling 