I feel like mystery thrillers these days are all about the shock factor rather than crafting a good mystery story that makes sense. Tiffany Crum’s This Story Might Save Your Life is no exception. Did I devour this book to find out what happens at the end? Of course I did. I am like a cat; curiosity got the better of me. Did I mostly dislike this book while I was reading it? Also, of course I did. I have really got to stop reading overly hyped mystery novels.

This Story Might Save Your Life is about best friends Benny and Joy who cohost a popular podcast (ugh) where they recount near-death survival stories while telling jokes. Joy has narcolepsy, which is very important to the plot and her relationships with the other characters, and about the only really interesting thing about this entire novel.

One day Joy and her husband go missing, and Benny becomes a suspect in their disappearance, which of course leads Benny to investigating Joy’s disappearance on his own because he doesn’t trust the police to do their job properly and he is worried about his best friend.

The story alternates between Benny’s first-person narration and Joy’s first-person narration through excerpts of the memoir she was working on at the time of her disappearance. The thing about first person narration is that you are supposed to be experiencing the story from the narrator’s perspective. You see what they see; you know what they know; and you get to see inside their head. But with Benny’s narration, Crum deliberately withholds information from Benny’s own thoughts that the reader should be privy to, and I fucking hate it when writers do that. It doesn’t make sense! We don’t withhold our own thoughts from ourselves; we just think them! The only way it would work for Benny to withhold information from the reader is if he was telling the story to the reader, which he isn’t doing in this novel. Joy’s narration through her memoir, on the other hand, is full of “dear reader”, which comes across as cringe and inauthentic. This isn’t Jane Eyre.

The “twists” in This Story Might Save Your Life are contrived and how they are revealed is nonsensical. The characters make so many stupid decisions in this story just to drag out the suspense and surprises. Benny has a history of hotheaded, violent behaviour, so the way he reacts kind of makes sense, but he is still an idiot. I really have a hard time with the choices that Joy makes, though. As a teenager with narcolepsy, she was determined to prove to her parents that she could take care of herself and live independently, but when she gets married, she allows herself to become wholly dependent on her husband, and still depends on him even when she learns what kind of a man he really is, including continuing to let him handle her medications. Say what?

I am seeing more and more of this type of lazy writing not just in books, but TV shows too. It’s insulting to the audience to expect us to blindly accept unreasonable character behaviour shoehorned in just to make a plot point work.

If I seem ornery, well, that’s because I am ornery. I am annoyed with constantly being disappointed by the mystery novels that are being published these days. I need mystery stories that are more cerebral than what is currently being offered.