Hidden Bodies By: Caroline Kepnes

“The real horror of my life is not that I’ve killed some terrible people. The real horror is that the people I’ve loved didn’t love me back.”

Caroline Kepnes, Hidden Bodies

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Overview:

Joe Goldberg needs a fresh start. A place where no one knows him or the secrets that he has left behind. LA is just the place. Everyone is far too concerned with being discovered as the next big writer/actor to realize there is a serial killer living down the street.

But old habits die hard and Joe finds a new obsession and will eliminate anything that stands in his way of true love,

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My thoughts:

It is hard to critique this book without comparing it to the first book in the series.

You, was suspenseful, creepy and unsettling. Hidden Bodies misses the mark and reads more like an angst filled coming of age novel than a thriller.

Joe is insufferable and spends most of the book pretending that he doesn’t want to be a sell out like everyone else in LA but then is upset when he can’t achieve fame. This character was already so well established that I felt this was digressing him to something else entirely.

I get the point that Kepnes is trying to make. The reader is supposed to relate to Joe in thinking that we are not like the annoying, self-centered secondary characters in the book but in reality, Joe is just like them and so are we. However, it just reads as annoying people being annoyed by other annoying people and I didn’t need to read 400 pages of that.

The plot could have been flushed a lot quicker and the story could have benefited from some editing. I get that he’s a serial killer and he likes killing people but some of the kills were a bit of a stretch and weren’t necessary to the story. Maybe the third book needed some of these scenes that don’t seem to be important but for right now, it makes it feel like we are given information just because there was a word count requirement or to add shock value.

I don’t want to harp on all the flaws of this book and I think that had the first book not been so strong and precise, this would have been a great story.

I liked the fact that the relationships were very different. It would have been easy for everyone to have met the same fate as the characters that mirrored them in You but they all had their own unique demise.

I can’t decide if I like the fact that every character has a counterpart from the first book. It would be really interesting if this were because Joe projects those identities onto them from his past experiences but I don’t know if this is what the author was going for or if her writing style mimics itself. I’d like to believe that it was a conscious choice.

For all the criticism I have given the book, it still moves the story forward and in a new direction. I am looking forward to reading the final book and hope that it can get some of the magic back into the series.

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Overall,

I don’t think it quite measured up to the captivating story of the first book. Perhaps it is the setting of sunny California compared to the dark tone of New York/New England that just couldn’t re-create the suspense that I grew to expect from the series.

Rating: 2/5 stars