Epeolatry Book Review: Come Join the Murder

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Title: Come Join the Murder
Author: Holly Rae Garcia
Genre: Crime
Publisher: Close to the Bone (an imprint of Gritfiction Ltd.)
Release Date: 27 March 2020

Synopsis: Rebecca Crow’s four-year-old son is dead, and her husband is missing.

Divers find her husband’s car at the bottom of a canal with their son’s small, lifeless body, inside. The police have no suspects and nothing to go on but a passing mention of a man driving a van. Guilt and grief cloud Rebecca’s thoughts as she stumbles towards her only mission: Revenge.

James Porter knows exactly what happened to them, but he’ll do anything to keep it a secret.

James didn’t plan to kill Rebecca’s son, but he’s not too broken up about it, either. There are more important things for him to worry about. He needs money, and his increasing appetite for murder is catching the attention of a nosy detective.

“Looks like the AAA guy is here already; we’ll just ride with him.”  Jon Crow had no idea how mistaken he was on that day at the southeastern Texas beach.  He and his child, Oliver, would not return home. A heartless psychopath and his reluctant sidekick saw to that.

Come Join the Murder is fortified with strong characters and follows Rebecca Crow, now childless after her baby boy is found dead, and her missing husband.  Garcia rakes our sympathies through Rebecca’s worry, her distress, and her unraveling. We carry her grief and are left feeling the sadness of her inner thoughts and hindsight.  Memories haunt her as she forces herself to get up every day. Hope turns to despair. The book annihilated my senses in demonstrating what her darkest days felt like. 

The story is told between real time and backstory, reconstructing the last day Rebecca saw her family.  We’re treated to a little more insight each time Garcia returns us to that fateful day. I learned a lot about who the characters were and how they lived their lives with the author dropping me right into the action.

The antagonist, James Porter, is mean.  He’s never known respect, regret, or remorse.  He kills because he can. I was caught off-guard a number of times at the depths of his malice.

This suspenseful book shows a mother’s anguish and determination to see justice.  We watch Rebecca dip into insanity. Will she tire of Detective Barnes’ inability to find her husband and take matters into her own hands?

Without giving any of the good stuff away, I’ll say that the distraught protagonist does a thing once – Oh my!, then twice – She did it AGAIN?  The third time—it didn’t grab me as much. Maybe twice was enough.

This book was hard to put down.  Every chapter hooked me and kept me on the edge of my seat bursting with Oh no she didn’t!  Garcia’s novel ended in a way that left me thinking about what must have happened while keeping a definitive conclusion at bay.  It does not, however, rob us of a masterful story.

This is a novel I would read and reread and recommend to others.  Fans of vigilante and desperado revenge will delight in this horror story.

4.5/5 stars

‘Come Join The Murder’ is available on Amazon.

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