Dollface
By Lindy Ryan

Horror author Jill Marshall and her family are the new neighbors in a New Jersey suburb. It doesn’t take long for her neighbor, Darla, to get her unwillingly wrapped up in a PTA group of cliquey women. When the neighborhood becomes a target for a killer, the women have something new to gossip about.

I really struggled with this one. Shallow character development. The humor fell flat. Awkward, clunky prose often felt confusing, sometimes veering into nonsensical. Phrases like “my darling husband” and “my sweet new neighbor” were repeated ad nauseam (22 times, each).

Heavy on the horror movie references, which grew tiresome. The main character’s theories about the killer so closely circumvent the obvious culprit that one might suspect she’s being willfully obtuse.

Overall, I found this underwhelming, gratingly predictable and punishingly repetitive. This is probably for someone. Not for me.

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

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