Customer Reviews

The Killing Club: A Mystery, Based on a Story by Josh Griffith

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I hate to say that I didn't expect a lot out of this book, but bought it more for the novelty (no pun intended) of it. As a viewer of One Life to Live I was curious to see if the book was more for plot purposes on the show or a real novel. I was pleasantly surprised! It is a delightful book, with lots of humor and enough mystery to keep me interested enough to read the whole book in one sitting.

I am a big fan of the Soap One Life to Live and when I heard about the book being avaible to everyone I went to the bookstore and bought it. The book is very interesting. Yet it also keeps you in suspense as to who is behind it all. This is a great murder mystery and I would highly reccomend it to anyone of my friends.

So when I bought this book I was a little put off by the sticker on it relating to One Life to Live. All in all, I really ejoyed it. I had just finished a book that left my mind bogged down and this was the perfect answer. A light, quick, read with a good story line and a decent cast of characters. If you enjoy whodunnits and like a little humor with your mystery, you'll enjoy this book even though it was a little predicable.

This book was better than I could've ever imagined. I myself do not like reading books because very few authors can pull off a good book. At first, I was THINKING I was going to be disappointed, because the author was a writer of a soap that doesn't always do its best, and it just seemed weird. However, I took a huge step and read it. There is humor, tons of mystery and suspense, a few affairs, common controversy, guaranteed shocks in every chapter, and a question you will ask yourself, who is killing the Killing Club and how close are they to the main character? This book is an easy read and will be liked by most, if not all.

I bought this book as a gift for my mother. She's an avid fan of the show and couldn't wait to really read this book that everyone was talking about on her favorite soap.

Take it for what it is...a book written by a fictional character on a Soap...it's a read for fun! If you really like the show, I'm sure you will love it.

I think it was my mom's way of kind of being part of the action because everyone on the show was reading it. I thought it was a cute concept. Anway, again, she loved it and I have since read the book myself. I do not watch the show or know anything about the show, but I did enjoy this book as well. It was a really fun and easy read. So whether you do watch the show or do not, I honestly believe you will like this book. I did and my mother loved it.

I'm glad I could do this for my mom. She deserves something nice every now and then...a little "I love you just because gift" never hurt anyone and books are great for that! Thanks for listening to me ramble!!

I read this novel and enjoyed it sort of as you would enjoy a chocolate sundae.The plot rolls along and you keep turning the pages as the characters keep getting killed off one by one. The police detective Jamie Ferrara is likeable. The author keeps setting up likely villains but they keep getting killed. The real villain is one you would least suspect. As someone else wrote, the motivation for the suite of murders is not particularly persuasive.

This is a great book & if you watch OLTL you are going to love it. It is following right along with the show & when you get to the end & find out who the killer is it is going to be a shocker. As it goes along a member of the club is killed the same way as they wrote it when they were teens. Not kind killings. And the first one fell down the stars & burned to death & the next was was in a car accident just like what is happening on the show.

Not only is this a page-turner, the characters come right off the page and talk to you. You can hear their voices.
If you were sorry when the story ended, the good news is that the author (Michael Malone)has written other novels. Start with "The Last Noel."

I did not realize when I bought this that it was a gimmick; i.e, written in conjunction with a soap opera. If I had, I probably would not have bought it and saved myself 3 hours that could have been spent reading something else. The characters were sterotypes, and I didn't like any of them except for Amanda (she was the only one who seemed to have any real personality.) The ending was predictable-- I figured it had to be the person that was being most completely ignored as a suspect and not the one that Jamie was convinced was the murderer or the one whom the author was quite obviously trying to point the reader toward (I don't want to give the ending away.)

That aside, I had a hard time getting past the ethical issues of the Police Detective, Jamie, investigating a case in which she had an obvious personal connection-- her main suspect is related to her by marriage, and she has a huge grudge against him-- and the fact that she was engaged to marry her boss- although why, I can't figure out as she really didn't seem to like him very much and treated him like dirt. A professional police officer would have recused herself from the investigation-- her excuse that she outranked Danny was flimsy at best.

While I didn't find the constant crude language as much of a turn off as some of the other reviewers have mentioned, I felt it was more for shock value than anything else-- let's show how tough Jamie is by having her throw the "s" word and the "f" word around a lot.

All that being said, I did like one thing and that is that Jamie was capable of taking care of herself, particularly at the end when she came face to face with the killer. Too many times authors have female detectives doing really stupid things, like leaving their cell phones at home, to set up a situation that puts the heroine in danger. I appreciated the author giving Jamie the dignity of being able to get herself out of the situation without a knight in white armor riding to the rescue. Because of that, I'll give it 3 stars instead of the 1 or 2 it probably deserves.

Kathy Brier (writing as Marcie Walsh for some reason) and Michael Malone have come up with a pretty interesting idea for a story. A group of 12 unpopular New Jersey high school kids would hang out in an abandoned warehouse thinking up and writing down interesting ways they would murder their tormentors (teachers, popular kids, parents well everyone other than them really). They decided to call a halt to this practice when one of them committed suicide. Now more than a decade later members of The Killing Club are highly successful in their small town community, some have even moved away but one day they start turning up dead, murdered in ways which seem to be carbon copies of entries they wrote in the 'Death Book'. One of these former members, Detective Sergeant Jamie Ferrara has to firstly convince her colleagues, boyfriend boss, as well as the other members of the former The Killing Club, that there is a killer targeting them and then work out who the killer is before there are no more members left.

Sounds like a great story yes, and it will pass the time but it does drag on in parts and the characters aren't written well enough that you feel for them or care about them at all especially the lead character Detective Sergeant Jamie Ferrara. Dating her boss, Danny/Donny and other aspects really weren't needed for the story to flow and these factors played no major part in the story other than making it more unbelievable, complicated and boring at times. I also don't really understand why the main author Kathy Brier is writing under a pen name for anonymity when she sticks a huge portrait photograph of herself on the back cover. If you can get a copy from the library and there's nothing else around to read give it a look but there are a lot better novels out their. Read Hindsight by Barbara Rogan for a great serial killing class reunion thriller instead.