Good Samaritans by Will Carver

Good Samaritans
By Will Carver
Published by Orenda Books (E-book - 15 September 2018; Paperback - 15 November 2018)
I received an Advance Reader Copy from the publisher

Publisher's description

One crossed wire, three dead bodies and six bottles of bleach

Seth Beauman can’t sleep. He stays up late, calling strangers from his phonebook, hoping to make a connection, while his wife, Maeve, sleeps upstairs. A crossed wire finds a suicidal Hadley Serf on the phone to Seth, thinking she is talking to The Samaritans.
But a seemingly harmless, late-night hobby turns into something more for Seth and for Hadley, and soon their late-night talks are turning into day-time meet-ups. And then this dysfunctional love story turns into something altogether darker, when Seth brings Hadley home…
And someone is watching…

My verdict
On the day Good Samaritans arrived in the post, I thought I'd just 'check it out'.

So I read the first page...

        Then I read the first chapter...

                 Then I read the whole book...

                            And then, that evening, I tweeted this:

I loved Michael Grothaus' Epiphany Jones, also published by Orenda Books. On the surface (or if you read the blurb), Good Samaritans is nothing like it - the stories are very different, the subject matter too. But inside, I found the same quirkiness, darkness and humour, again packaged neatly in a brilliantly written, additive read.

Short chapters switch seamlessly between the lead characters, which prompted me to read 'just one more'. I should have hated so many characters but I loved them all instead. These are ordinary people doing extraordinary things behind closed doors. Good Samaritans? Definitely... but only on their own terms. Who knew insomnia could be so dangerous?

Good Samaritans is sexy, dark, explicit and graphic in places, so certainly not for the fainthearted. It's twisty and twisted too. Is this love story? Oh yes, but not necessarily in the way you think. It's certainly a tale of lust, obsession, control and desperation.

The book kept me guessing and certainly kept me engrossed, with many 'laugh out loud' moments and pages read with a gasp. It's an incredibly hard book to review without giving anything away - and I really do hope that other reviewers are equally as careful. This is a book that needs to be read 'blind', just using the blurb on the jacket as your guide.

To sum it up - I loved this book and will happily shout about it from the rooftops! In fact, I'm sure I will over the coming months (and beyond). And I'll never look at bottles of bleach in quite the same way again.