Hello Beautiful People! Welcome back to another review! For this review I get into the true crime style – but don’t be fooled like me at first it’s a fiction – book that follows the interview of those involved in the disappearance of a teenage girl. Kill Show by Daniel Sweren-Becker is a twisty book that focuses on the issues with the glorification of crime.
Some warnings for future readers
- This book includes murder
My Review
I won’t be doing a summary and commentary section for this book because it’s such a new book, and is a pretty fast-paced read, that I would recommend you check this one out. Before I said this book fooled me and it did. It literally says true crime novel on the front so I thought this was a true crime book. It was only when I started to get into the book that I needed to check out the people in this book more. I was confused about how some could still have jobs but I figured out it was fiction and none of them are real people. The fact that it’s fiction doesn’t take away from the book at all really but I just don’t get how it can’t say true crime when it’s not? I mean maybe it’s inspired by one but I didn’t see anything in the book that mentioned that so I am not sure. I mean the author really acts like this was real so I was defiantly fooled. I definitely was glad that a real person didn’t go missing and maybe that was the author’s point, make a true crime book where no one real is really affected, and a real family doesn’t have to relive a terrible crime.
I ended up enjoying the book a lot but it lost me a bit at the end calling for an 8/10 rating. I won’t get into all the characters in the book but there’s a lot. The nice part about this book is it’s presented in an interview style. I am neurodivergent so I love it when books do this if there are a lot of characters. It helps me keep everything together way better. The book follows 10 years after the disappearance of Sara Parcell. A smart, kind, and seemingly average 16-year-old girl, when she goes missing it sets off alarm bells for many people. Casey Hawthorne a young and hungry reality TV producer hears the sound of money. Dave and Jeannette, Sara’s parents, allow Casey to video the process of them looking for their daughter, and she releases the episodes in real time for the world to follow along. As one can guess a show called ‘Finding Sara’ can go a lot of different ways, and we get to hear the different character’s perspectives and ideas as to why they think the whole thing went wrong.
I thought the topic of the book was really interesting in that it focused on how the media sinks its teeth into a tragedy. Not only that but how being in the spotlight isn’t for everyone. It’s interesting because pretty much every one of the characters who weren’t in the Hollywood media before Sara’s disappearance says they wish they had nothing to do with the show all these years later. They got sucked into the energy of it all early on, only to deal with the consequences for much longer afterwards. I guess given all the drama of the book I expected the main climax of the book, which is what happened to Sara to go a different way. I’ll be real I was a bit disappointed with what it ended up being. There are a lot of good twists and turns in this book but this one was a bummer for me. It’s only because it didn’t change my personal perspective of Sara which is that she’s a young girl who ended up in a terrible situation, but it changed a lot of other characters. I didn’t love this shift in the book, but I didn’t hate it either. I just wished that this tiny thing didn’t taint how so many people saw her, I don’t think the right characters got the focus they deserved on that.
The characters in the book are super dynamic, and so different from one another that it’s hard to put the book down. You want to continue to read the drama between them, but sometimes I would forget that this was a book about a missing person and not the drama between the characters. I like how with so many characters we get to see everyone’s opinion and perspective. When one character says something, we may get a challenge, rebuke, or other perspective on that claim. It made it so as the reader we were left guessing a lot and it was hard to know who to trust. I think the interesting part about this piece of the book though is how it speaks to an issue we have with true crime nowadays. A lot of true crime out there doesn’t provide perspectives from all sides. Don’t get me wrong there are obviously some stories out there where we don’t need it, but there are lots of others where we clearly do. If we don’t get all sides, there is a strong chance we aren’t getting the full story. The issue with this though is that people lie. Even with some characters in the book I struggled to believe if they were really telling the truth, and then there are others who you can clearly just tell are not.
I’ll say the feel of this book which I think Daniel was trying to reach, in which he made it feel like listening to a true crime documentary was done wonderfully. I’ll be honest I found myself getting caught up in the other issues of the characters in the book and realizing that this is also a major theme in true crime. A lot of people like to talk about how the crime affected them, not how it affected the victim. It’s a common theme we see in which people use the frenzy and fame of a crime to try to get their own 15 minutes. This is huge in this book because it’s clear that people will follow the wave and trend and will hop on the most popular bandwagon of the time to fit in with the crowd. There’s a point in the book in which a random man is named in the TV show as being someone who was following Sara. There was literally no evidence of this other than her friends saying he was weird, and overnight this man’s life was ruined. In 15 minutes the police can see he had nothing to do with it, but at that point, it’s too late, his name is trashed. The people who said the name got their 15 minutes but ruined his life in the process, and his families. This happens all the time today when people go for the neck with no evidence.
Overall I really enjoyed the book. It’s a fun quick read, that with all the craziness and twists makes you happy that none of the characters are real. It’s a super unique way to focus on a lot of the issues we have going on today with how we approach true crime in the media. I hope you enjoyed this review! Do you think you’ll want to check out this one? Feel free to follow me on all my socials @baddiebookreviews to be kept up to date for when I really
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