Never Saw Me Coming by Vera Kurian (2021) We only wish this book had fully lived up to its potential.......cause its premise sucked us in like a nuclear powered vacuum cleaner......
A college that recruits psychopath students to study them while they study? Yes please.
A psychopathic cutie-pie frosh who's out to fulfill her long held self-promise to murder a frat-boy classmate who raped her when she was 12? You had us at hello.
A murderer who's identified the 8 psychopaths in the collegiate study and is systematically stalking and killing them in all sorts of gruesome ways? For the love of Norman Bates, hallelujah!!
Everything was in place here for a juicy up-all-night read, but the book's start-and-stop pacing constantly kept slowing it down at exactly the times when the story should have made us tear through the pages at light speed.
We could tell that author Vera Kurian was enamored with her main character and primary narrator, the feisty, sexy psychopath Chloe Sevre, whose hotness functions mainly as part of her weaponry. Lacking anything resembling moral human emotions and empathy, she also lacks the healthy sense of fear built into normal humans......so in her quest to hunt down the hunter of her fellow psychos, she brazenly plunges into dark rooms and alleys like a fractured Nancy Drew.
Full confession: we loved her as much as the author and really hope she'll stick around for further adventures, just like the beloved and feared Lisabeth Salander of the 'Dragon Tattoo' thrillers....
Forming her own Scooby gang, she's aided by the dashing Charles, newly elected Class President and rich-boy psychopath (who's got a thing for Chloe and vice versa)......and Andre, a black freshman who's hiding the fact that he's no psycho at all, but lied his way into the study for free college tuition.
Twists, turns and and the expected surprise reveal of the real killer await, but as we said at the beginning of this post, too many chapters slow the proceeding down with a lot of overwritten descriptive blah-blah-blah.
But long live Chloe Sevre, we say and we'd love to imagine what kind of lethal chaos she wreaks during the rest of her college career....or beyond. 3 stars (***).
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