Blog Tour | Book Review: Good Samaritans by Will Carver #GoodSamaritans #SixBottlesOfBleach

Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for Good Samaritans by Will Carver, it’s my pleasure to be sharing my review with you all today.

One crossed wire, three dead bodies and six bottles of bleach

Seth Beauman can’t sleep. He stays up late, calling strangers from his phonebook, hoping to make a connection, while his wife, Maeve, sleeps upstairs. A crossed wire finds a suicidal Hadley Serf on the phone to Seth, thinking she is talking to The Samaritans.

But a seemingly harmless, late-night hobby turns into something more for Seth and for Hadley, and soon their late-night talks are turning into day-time meet-ups. And then this dysfunctional love story turns into something altogether darker, when Seth brings Hadley home…

And someone is watching…

Dark, sexy, dangerous and wildly readable, Good Samaritans marks the scorching return of one of crime fiction’s most exceptional voices.

Holy shit, what an opening! Good Samaritans makes you pay attention from the very first page. A thoroughly exciting opening, sinister as hell, but so exciting!

“It will burn. It will blister. You will bleed.”

The premise of the plot is so intriguing, you have Seth, the insomniac, calling strangers, and he happens to end up talking to a suicidal Hadley. I found their conversations so interesting – Hadley, I understand, because she thought she had called The Samaritans, but in some dark part of my brain, I was fascinated by Seth because who does that, dialling strangers from a phonebook!?

What Good Samaritans does so well is build suspense; as the plot builds so does the intrigue, especially once you find out who the ‘someone’ who is watching is. This someone’s actions frustrated me to no end, but they certainly added to the plot in a way that made it unpredictable. And unpredictability is what crime thriller fans crave, the inability to guess the direction of events. And that was the case here, this plot threw me a few times, and each time it was deliciously dark!

There were some dialogue and inner monologues in this novel that I really liked, especially from Seth and Hadley….

“living in the moment was only ever good in the moment”

What do you do when the moment has passed, well, you have to find another, and then another, and that’s how you live life, chasing these moments, but this isn’t without risk, because in between those moments darkness closes in, and that darkness might just follow you into your next moment!

Good Samaritans has those short chapters that allow you to breeze through this novel, but it isn’t plain sailing, the twists will throw you sideways! I don’t know what dark places your mind enters, Mr. Carver, but damn, I’m disturbed! The blurb is so right to describe this novel as a “dysfunctional love story”, but it’s dysfunctional in the best way, in a dark and twisted way! This novel doesn’t hold back on the narration, and the content does get a bit sexually explicit (personal preference: I wasn’t a fan of these moments), the plot gets very dark and intense, so if you like your fiction PG, probably best to give this one a miss. However, if you want to embark on a journey of twisted love, dark obsessions, and murder, then Good Samaritans may just be the book for you.

This book is available to buy from: Amazon UK / Book Depository

*My thanks to Orenda Books for providing me with a copy of this book & Random Things Tours for inviting me to participate in the blog tour*

Will Carver is the international bestselling author of the January David series (Arrow). He spent his early years in Germany, but returned to the UK at age 11, when his sporting career took off. He turned down a professional rugby contract to study theatre and television at King Alfred’s, Winchester, where he set up a successful theatre company.

He currently runs his own fitness and nutrition company, while working on his next thriller. He lives in Reading with his two children.

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