Book Review: Love Letters to a Serial Killer | Tasha Coryell

An unhinged, self-absorbed narrator begins writing to an accused serial killer in Love Letters to a Serial Killer. I found this book so fun—if you enjoy unlikable narrators, this is a great read!

What is Love Letters to a Serial Killer about?

Thirty-something Hannah works a low-paying communications job at a nonprofit that she is quietly miserable in. Not miserable enough to find a different job, but miserable enough to long for something else. After a guy she was hooking up with ghosts her for another woman and her friend Meghan gets into a serious relationship, Hannah is even more unhappy.

She finds some level of engagement in a true crime forum online, where a community is on a mission to solve the murder of a beautiful woman named Anna Leigh. A forum member is searching the ravine where Anna Leigh was found and discovers another body. When a third and fourth are found, it becomes clear that a serial killer is at work. Not long after, a handsome and wealthy lawyer named William is arrested for the murders and awaits trials.

Hannah feels angry and bored after William’s arrest, and so she begins to write letters to him. When William responds, Hannah is intrigued. Her interest transforms from curiosity to obsession, and she torpedoes her life without any regard to the fallout. After losing her job, Hannah drives to Georgia to attend William’s trial where she meets a few other women who have as unhealthy of a fixation as she does. And when William is found not guilty, things finally seem to be looking up for Hannah. Unless William really is a serial killer… Hannah knows she needs to find out the truth or die trying.

What did I think?

I suspect this book won’t be for everyone (but aren’t those sometimes the best books?). Hannah is self-absorbed and illogical to a maximum extent, and those who need to understand why someone makes the decisions they do (and agree with them) probably won’t find Hannah to be the most relatable. At the same time, she is the sort of unhinged narrator that positively tickles me. She has terrible takes on everything, justifies her own laziness and self-centered nature by making herself a victim, and judges everyone around her for trying to engage with her as a friend. On her friend Meghan getting a boyfriend, Hannah muses:

“For so long, the two of us had pined over men together and she had gone and gotten herself a man without me. Sometimes the deepest betrayals were things that women did to one another.”

Hannah often made me laugh with her bizarre and unexpected takes on life. I thought she was a lot of fun, and the audiobook narration by Andi Arndt is perfection. Arndt expertly captures Hannah’s absurd and self-indulgent voice, bringing to life this story of a woman who spent her life doing the should, only to find herself miserable and unsure how to voice it. Despite her unlikability, Hannah had these moments of vulnerability and raw insight that made her at times verging on relatable.

“It was hard, even for those of us who hadn’t been accused of killing anyone, to love ourselves. Oftentimes I found it easier to accept the bad things that happened to me than the good. If only because I struggled to find myself worthy of anything rewarding.”

Hannah’s spiral that led her to write letters to an accused serial killer isn’t what I expected. She had been seeing a guy named Max (primarily they were just hooking up, but she hoped it would eventually turn to more) when he ghosts her, moves on to another girl, and blocks her on social media. This all coincides with the first murder, and Hannah gets involved with an online true crime forum where she gets overly invested in the case. As more bodies are discovered, Hannah becomes obsessed. Absurdly, she seems to find a connection between what she went through with Max and what the women are going through. This is what prompts her to write to William, telling him off as though he were the one who ghosted her.

“This was not to suggest that being murdered and being shunned by a boy that I wasn’t even in a real relationship with were equivalent, but to say that it was a bad time for a lot of us.”

Eventually, Hannah’s obsession with the case leads her to lose her job. But not only did Hannah not enjoy her job, by this point she is all consumed by William. Hannah attends the trial, and she meets a few other true crime junkies obsessed with the case. They are an odd trio and I found it amusing how they simultaneously are one another’s only support who truly gets it, but also how they are sort of in competition with one another. When William is released from prison, Hannah and him settle down and that is when the fun begins. Hannah is constantly collecting tidbits that are either in support of or against William being a serial killer. For his part, William doesn’t confess nor deny the crimes. Is he truly a serial killer? And if so, who is his accomplice for the fifth murder that happened while he was in prison?

“I was always doing that, denying myself immediate pleasure for the sake of setting a scene.”

This is a wild story and the ending is somehow even more wild than I even expected! Enjoy the ride here—this book has a lot to unpack when you get to the end and trust me, you won’t see it coming!

Thank you to Berkley Publishing for my copy. Opinions are my own.