Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Okay, here is my confession.  Too Old For This is a book about a woman who is a serial killer, with five or six (I kind of lost count) murders behind her when the novel opens.  And I was rooting for her throughout the book!

Lottie Jones is a woman in her mid-seventies, living a quiet life.  Her only pastime is going to her church twice a week, once for Thursday bingo games and once for Sunday services.  A more blameless life is hard to imagine.

But all this is threatened when she opens her door to Plum Dixon, a young woman who wants to do a documentary about Lottie, whom she believes was falsely accused of murders more than forty years earlier, and set the record straight.  That would be admirable except for the fact that Lottie was not falsely accused, and she has no desire to have her life reopened for public scrutiny.

The two women sit down at Lottie’s kitchen table and talk about the project that Plum has in mind, and while Plum is searching her phone for clips of her work to share with the older woman, Lottie stands behind her and hits her over the head with an umbrella.  It’s not the situation she wants but the one she has to deal with.  And so the murders continue.

It’s hard to put my finger on why I was rooting for Lottie.  Looking at it objectively, here is a woman who has no qualms about murder if it helps her keep her life private.  She has been using a false name for more than forty years with great success, and she sees no reason why that should change.  If only those pesky people–police investigators, Plum’s mother, Plum’s boyfriend, and others whom we meet–would leave Lottie alone to live the remainder of her life.

Lottie narrates Too Old For This, but she doesn’t make excuses for the murders she commits.  In her mind, she’s justified because all she wants is her privacy, and the people she kills just won’t let her be.  Can you condemn her for getting them out of the way?

Samantha Downing has written a spellbinding book, one that captivated me from the first chapter.  Her characters, good and not so good, make you understand their motivations.  Why can’t they leave Lottie alone?

Too Old For This is brilliantly written, with a main character whose moral compass is definitely skewed in the wrong direction.  But you can’t stop reading about her, or at least I couldn’t.

You can read more about the author at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

One Response to “TOO OLD FOR THIS by Samantha Downing: Book Review”