Review of Finlay Donovan is Killing It by Elle Cosimano

“My Google search history alone was probably enough to put me on a government watch list. I wrote suspense novels about murders like this. I’d searched every possible way to kill someone. With every conceivable kind of weapon.”

— Elle Cosimano

When I started graduate school in my hometown, a drastic change from the life I was living as an undergraduate in New York City, I ended up starting a new job on-campus in an attempt to increase my income so I could afford tuition out of pocket.

Thankfully, I was able to land a job at school, but one of the greater parts of my job (besides the fact I sometimes get to do my homework and write these lovely blog posts when no one comes in for an appointment) is the fact we have a book club every couple of weeks or every two months.

It gets me outside of my comfort zone when it comes to the kind of books that I read, and because I have such particular taste most of the time, I end up living inside of a bubble when it comes to books.

And that, dear readers, is how I ended up reading a book like Finlay Donovan is Killing It. I had never heard of the book before my boss suggested it as one of our reads for the following month, and suddenly I was due to read it quite soon. So I checked it out of my local library, sat down one Saturday, and read the entire book in one sitting. Did I enjoy it? Not really, but I thought it was compelling at times.

Onwards with the review!

A divorcing mother of two and writer ends up being accidently hired as a contract killer, leading her into even worse situations.

The protagonist of the novel is Finlay Donovan, who, in a nutshell, does not have her shit together. She’s a mother of two young kids, and author who sold her first novel and has burned through the first half of her advance, and her husband is lowkey making the threats against her because she is unable to pay the house payments.

We learn pretty early on that he cheated on her with their real estate agent, and just recently he ended up dropping their babysitter because he was the one paying her. Finlay, in the opening scenes of the novel, missed a meeting with her editor and reschedules it for a local Panera, and while they’re chatting over their soups and bread about the murder mystery, a woman overhears them.

After her editor leaves, Finlay finds a note from the woman telling her to call her, and when she does, discovers that the woman actually wants her to murder her husband for a sum of $50,000.

Finlay tries to tell her that she’s not actually a contract killer, but she doesn’t listen. She heads to the bar in search of the man wearing a disguise she keeps referring to throughout the novel as a wig scarf, but then ends up flirting with the hot bartender Julian. If she’s getting divorced, it’s not sacrilege, right? Except for the fact that Finlay is using her ex’s newest beau’s name: Theresa.

At the bar, she finds the husband with another woman, and, after distracting the other woman, she ends up talking to him and switching their drinks. As it turns out, he had slipped drugs into the other woman’s drinks and was planning to roofie her.

We learn not too long after that event he does this a lot with women, blackmailing them with the images he takes and then taking things from them in the process. Finlay takes his passed out body home with her, and leaves him in the garage with the car.

When she returns, she finds out that he asphyxiated to death in the garage, and she thought she left it cracked open so that actually wouldn’t happen.

Her babysitter, Vero, walks in while she’s hunched over the man’s body, and that ends up creating an unlikely partnership between the two because Vero is lowkey bribed with the money to keep quiet.

The two end up putting his body in the car, taking it to Finlay’s ex’s farm, and bury him in the grass, attempting to hide the evidence in the process. They return home, Vero ends up moving in with the family again and takes care of the kids, and then all seems somewhat normal. Until the wife goes missing and the police are looking for the missing man and now his wife as well.

And if to make things worse, Finlay starts writing a novel about what happened with them, and it sells a massive advance for two books once she sends it to her editor. The husband had connections to the mob, who are looking for him, and now the two have been given another hit by another wife, this time actually in the mob.

She starts getting involved with the cop assigned to the case because of her sister’s meddling, they have to kill this Russian mob enforcer, and Theresa actually seems more involved than it seems originally.

This novel I can summarize to as being very convenient, as things just line up perfectly in the weirdest ways possible, as if they’re stretching to make sense.

Overall Thoughts

Like I said, I was not a fan of the novel. I thought it was fun at times, but it tried way too hard to make this mother’s crime-filled life too convenient.

It would’ve worked as a dark humor television series, and I’m sure it’s going to be turned into that eventually, but this was not a book I typically would’ve picked up. Granted, I didn’t stop reading it, so it wasn’t absolutely terrible in my mind, but I can see how other people would enjoy.

My book club summarized it as just okay by the end of our conversation. The writing isn’t bad, but it relies too much on certain moments and plot holes to make sense. It felt like a lot crammed into the plot, like one twist was happening after the other, and that it was trying to distract the reader from other things. To each their own, though, at the end of the day.

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