Rebekah Johnson
has a really big secret, one she's pretty sure will end her new relationship
with Scott. She'd like to tell him, but she anticipates his response would be
to break up with her. Or report her to the police. Most likely both. Rebekah is
a fledgling serial killer, and she's not ready to put killing aside. What's a
young serial killer to do? Can she give up killing to save her relationship?
REVIEW:
I have to admit
that I messed up. I actually read the second book in this story first, but
that’s another review.
Instrument of Evil is about a female serial killer as she
grows up, and the events that led her to kill. During college, she has to write
a thesis for phycology, and decides to write two separate ones. One thesis is
about children, and their habits of lying, and the other about psychopaths,
which Rebekah has self-diagnosed herself as.
FROM THE BOOK:
I was forced to accept the idea that I
was a psychopathic person, a person who would lie, cheat, steal, and hurt
others, for the fun of it.
The first third
of the book was spent solely on backstory, which seemed to serve no real
purpose other than to prove that she was brought up in a somewhat normal
household. Rebekah’s character rubbed off on me as a spoiled, intelligent, brat,
who only did things for attention. There were long descriptions of family
vacations and shopping trips, but they didn’t really show us anything other than
descriptions.
There was
nothing fantastic about the first half of the book to me, and I had trouble
really getting into the story, as it was just normal life of a girl growing up.
She gets into trouble like most teens, and the only thing remotely disturbing
is that fact that she lied and help convict an innocent man of rape.
The story is
told from first person perspective, and could have easily showed us insight
into the mind of a killer, or given us opinions of what a serial killer thought
of the events around her, but there were only a few sarcastic monologues that
reminded me of the disgruntled teen that she is.
Personally, when
I read a description about a book that includes a serial killer, I expect
murder to be a huge premise of the story. We don’t really start to tread on the
subject of murder until we are almost halfway through the book.
Even though
Rebekah’s character falls into the personality traits of a psychopath (for
those who study theory of mind obsessively like me), the traits actually tend
to sway toward the tame side, and even then I had trouble finding it
convincing. I was hoping for more of an internal struggle from the character,
and it just wasn’t there. I believe that the author was shooting for a more
apathetic personality, which holds true in some cases, but I was hoping for a
massive tortured soul, possibly including the audio and visual hallucinations.
Rebekah’s psychopathic tendencies fall under the thrill-kill category, but her
off-putting personality has you doubting that she is even getting a thrill from
it. I was hoping to either see her fighting with the urge to kill people, or to
battle keeping her life in control because of the murders, but nether seemed to
emerge and flesh out. She seemed to drop in a line here or there that she stop
killing, but there was no big internal debate over the subject.
Now for the
kicker. We don’t know what really goes on in the mind of a serial killer
because most of them have either been sentenced to death, or have never been
caught. There are so many varying degrees of insanity that no two would be the
same, so to say that Rebekah’s character is unrealistic can be debated, and
let’s not forget the fact that this book is merely fiction.
I have to give
Loria Lowthert credit. It was a fabulous idea, and I still don’t know whether I
like this book or not, so I have to settle in the middle with a 3 star rating. The
book was well written and edited, and it had me arguing with myself over theory
of mind. I don’t think I’ve ever had a love/hate relationship with a book
before, until now.
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