Love Letters to a Serial Killer

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 15 APR 2024

Poet Coryell's impressive mystery debut chronicles a young woman's budding obsession with an accused killer. After Hannah's quest for a promotion at her Minneapolis nonprofit job stalls and her boyfriend ghosts her, she finds solace and kinship in an online true crime forum focused on identifying the culprit who murdered four women near Atlanta. When handsome young lawyer William Thompson is arrested and charged with the crimes, Hannah begins writing angry letters to him while he awaits trial behind bars. When William unexpectedly responds, their communication turns flirtatious. Before long, Hannah agrees to be his girlfriend, and becomes so consumed by their exchanges that she's fired from her job. She decides to go to Atlanta to watch William's trial, bonding with fellow "serial killer groupies" in the process. When another body is found during the trial in the same ravine where the other women were discovered, William is swiftly acquitted, and Hannah moves in with him, gradually growing accustomed to his moneyed lifestyle. All the while, however, she's nagged by doubts about her new beau's acquittal, and begins looking for incriminating clues. Coryell expertly renders her protagonist's uneasy perch between love and suspicion, keeping readers as in the dark as Hannah is about William's true nature until the very end. This is un-put-downable.