The Family Plot is an original domestic thriller about a reclusive family obsessed with true crime that finds themselves at the center of their own mystery. The Lighthouse's are an unusual family that lives on a secluded island. When Dahlia returns to the family home for her father's funeral, the family finds her twin brother's body buried in the plot meant for the patriarch of the family. Dahlia's twin went missing 10 years earlier. Each family member reacts in odd ways. Think Addams Family. This makes Dahlia question what secrets her family is keeping and what really happened to her twin brother a decade earlier. The characters are fascinating and well-developed. Highly recommended!! Be sure to check out The Family Plot today!

If there was a contest for weirdest and most disfuncti9nal family, I think this one might win! What a collection of strange siblings, obviously influenced by their mother and her obsession with the dead. Dahlia was never the same after her twin brother disappeared and the family scattered. Years later they all go home for their father’s funeral only to make a terrifying discovery. Very creepy!

The Family Plot is a domestic thriller about a true crime obsessed family who live reclusive lives on a small island where unsolved murders have taken place over the years. One of their family members goes missing and years later the family uncovers what happened.

I was immediately intrigued by the synopsis because I am a huge true crime fan and I loved the idea of this tie in. The book started out strong, but got repetitive in the middle and fizzled at the end. I thought the author had a great premise, but the execution was lacking. I wanted to like this one more than I did, but I found the twists predictable and nothing earth shattering.

Generally when you think of the term “family plot,” you refer to an area in a cemetery that has been bought by ones family for the burial of its various relatives. Well this is what I imagined The Family Plot by Megan Collins was going to be about. Boy was I wrong! The Family Plot took on a whole other meaning, in this case it also means a dramatic plot line involving various family members. It did take me a while to get into this book but please stick with it. About 60% into it is when I was really invested and it became clear that it was a keeper. Megan Collins is a master at keeping the suspense alive!

What a delightfully creepy story! It has all the elements of suspense I love: dark family secrets, fascinating characters, and unexpected twists. Plus beautiful prose. The Lighthouse family are quite unusual. They live in a secluded house on an island, dubbed the Murder Mansion. All of their children are named after the victims of serial killers and were home schooled, watching true crime documentaries and writing reports on serial killers. What a wonderfully chilling story—the perfect summer read!

It was obvious that something was off about this family, but figuring out exactly what, and when it all started, added a bit more mystery.

Despite growing up homeschooled with a curriculum of mostly serial killer details, Dahlia Lighthouse seems normal-ish. When her father dies, she finds herself back in her childhood home with her mother and two of her three siblings. The last time they were all together was the night Dahlia’s twin brother left home with only a note saying goodbye. No one had seen or heard from him since.

A grisly discovery is made shortly after they all reunite—their brother Andy is buried in their father’s plot, and he didn’t die of natural causes. How much do the Lighthouse siblings know about their family and each other? Can they figure out what really happened before the police decide who to blame so they can close the case?

This is a really hard story to talk about without revealing too much! I give it 3 out of 5 stars. It felt like the time without knowing any of the story, just the Lighthouse’s reputation in the community, went on for quite a while, and it would have been interesting to have more of a build up to the truths that most of the family knew all along. It was an intriguing family drama, and the backstory of the murder victims they learned about in their mother’s customized homeschool was curious.

This was such an entertaining and interesting book. I really enjoyed the pace and the characters but I thought it was pretty predictable and that’s why I gave it a three star review. I would still recommend this novel to friends, but I don’t think it was super memorable. Thanks to atria for my free copy for review!

I had really high hopes for this one, especially because so many early reviewers I regularly follow and get recommendations from talked so highly of this book. For me, it was just…..okay. Kind of interesting but by the end I just wanted to it to be done. There was also not one character I liked or connected to in this book, making it hard for me to really get immersed into the story.

I was so excited to dive into this book! I love the dark and twisted plot and crazy cast of characters. The story was fast paced and oozed creepy that forced me to keep reading through the night! My only disappointment was the ending. The only reason this book was a 4/5 stars for me was the fact that it ended “too neatly”. It had a much to “happy ending”’feel for me. I was expecting a final twist to knock my socks off. All in all though, this book was a unique thriller and I would recommend it!

If the Addams Family were real and set in modern day they would be the Lighthouse family. Dahlia Lighthouse was raised in an isolated house. Her family is obsessed with murder in general and The Blackburn Killer, a serial killer conveniently located on an island nearby. Dahlia returns home to bury her Father and gets caught up again in the mystery of what happened to her twin brother, who disappeared years ago, when his body turns up. All in all, a good story. I really like this author and her previous novels. I just wished there were some flashbacks and a little more character development. This would have been a 5 star read in that case. I like to feel as if I really know a character. Definitely do recommend though, especially if you like creepy families. Look forward to more from Ms. Collins!

Thank you to #NetGalley, Megan Collins and Atria Books for this ARC.

3.5 stars....

Unique and strange, this true crime family and their LMM (Memorial museum) was definitely an interesting read...

While I found the pacing a little slow, I was still eager to find out who the killer was.

Behind the Red Door was more my style, but I will still read anything by Megan Collins!

Thanks to the publisher & netgalley for my gifted copy - out now!

The cover of this book had me at first sight. I love eerie/gothic style thrillers and this one fit. It follows a true crime obsessed family that lives on a remote island. Once the children turn 18 they seem to flee to live normal lives without daily rituals to honor the murdered.

They reunite when their father passes away, but when digging his grave, the groundskeeper finds another body, their missing brother Andy. This prompts his twin sister, Dahlia to go digging into their family's past to find out what truly happened to him.

Overall, it was a solid, but not completely memorable thriller for me. It felt a bit predictable and never really seemed to surprise me. Plus I found Dahlia to be quite annoying.

3.5/5⭐️

The true crime-obsessed premise and island setting drew me in initially, and there were some great twists that kept me going, but overall I didn’t love The Family Plot. I felt like Dahlia was too quick to jump to conclusions, and she was honestly a boring narrator. I wasn’t a huge fan of this book.

This one was oddly satisfying and an entirely original premise with a cast of family members and characters you will go from hating to loving to despising to having your heart break for their pain and lost childhood. For those of you who like #fiction and #truecrime this is an easy, sharp, well done #read that satiates a taste for both.

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A mysterious, isolated family of true crime, #murder fanatics has lived forever on a secluded island in a mansion that is infamous in the local community. With two odd parents and four children, each named after a famous, chilling murder - Dahlia after The Black Dahlia, Charlie after the Lindbergh baby, Tate after Sharon Tate, and Andy after Andrew Borden, the children were homeschooled and raised in a world that revolves around honoring the victims of brutal crimes, at the same time that a serial killer preyed on innocent young women on their islands own shores.

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When three out of four children return to their home for the first time in years to bury their father, they are shattered by the discovery of an unexpected body in their father’s grave, the truth of their runaway brother’s fate, a hidden romance, and a house of horrors, darkness, and lies that they never expected, with the police desperate to nail a member of the despised family and the children desperate to vindicate their own identities and the soul of their most beloved family members.

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This one is layered with immense emotional grief, deep and complicated family love, and the lies we tell ourselves to cope with unimaginable pain, loss, and loneliness.

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This one is a goodie to say the least.

I have to say, I really enjoyed this book! I'm very into true crime myself, so a fictional family obsessed with it? Sign me up! The writing was awesome, and the book was tautly paced and very easy to follow and get into. My only complaint is that I figured out who did it early on. But the writing was so awesome that the book still gets 4 stars. A great read and I'm looking forward to her next book!

A family obsessed with true crimes becomes the center of one in this page-turning psychological thriller!

When the patriarch of the family dies, the Lighthouses reunite to for his memorial, but the last thing Dahlia expected to find was her twin brother, who went missing ten years ago, buried in their father’s grave. Was it the elusive serial killer who had wreaked havoc on their island when they were children, or was someone even more sinister behind Andy’s murder?

With the fascination for serial killers becoming more popular, this is the perfect time to release the book! What sets it apart is that the parents built their homeschool curriculum around true crimes and even named their children after famous murderers and victims. If that isn’t twisted enough, a member of their own family is murdered and the ways in which they each cope with the loss are extremely unusual, bordering on obsessive.

As unconventional and eccentric as this story was, I thought it was fantastic! It kept me on the edge of my seat until the very end, and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing how diverse the human psyche is through these dynamic characters. Highly recommend!

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4172395581

What a fantastic, moving, slightly creepy and entirely unexpected read. What you enter into as an admittedly cut-and-dry-seeming familial whodunit becomes...so not the point, in a novel that delves into what blood bonds mean in the fact of unfathomable tragedy. A very tearjerking joy of a novel.

Dahlia Lighthouse grew up in an unconventional family, to say the least. To say the most, she grew up in a mansion on a remote island with a mom who was obsessed with true crime/murders, named her kids after murder victims, and homeschooled her kids on a curriculum chock full of murder docs and obituaries. Oh, and they would host "Honorings" for those victims every year on their death anniversaries, lighting candles and bringing back their memories. Dahlia's twin brother, Andy, left this madness on their shared 16th birthday, running away with the rest of the family never hearing from him again.

10 years later, Dahlia and her two other siblings return to their island after their father dies, and many new mysteries arise. First, as the Lighthouse's groundskeeper is digging up their father's plot for his burial, he finds Andy's body, and the family learns that Andy didn't run away, he was murdered with his own axe and buried right in front of their house. Second, Dahlia begins to see connections with Andy's death and the Blackburn Killer, a serial murderer who killed young women right on the very island in which the Lighthouses grew up. These two mysteries are both waiting to be solved.

Although the premise of this book sounds intriguing, I was left disappointed by the execution. First of all, the "true crime obsessed family" bit was a little hokey and silly - I just couldn't take it seriously. It seemed unbelievable and frankly a little ridiculous for an initial setup. The characters themselves were not well developed at all, and don't change as people until the very end, when you learn a lot of needed context about the family.

Bear with me on this analogy, but a lot of the book almost felt like playing one of those first-person point-and-click computer games like Nancy Drew. After learning about Andy's death, each character becomes engrossed in some task: the Lighthouse mother is frantically baking cookies in some effort to nurture her children, brother Charlie is obsessed with putting together the Lighthouse Memorial Museum to put their sinister upbringing out on display for the whole island, and sister Tate is working on a diorama of Andy's death for that museum. Dahlia goes and "interacts" with them occasionally, but most of the book is following her around as she investigates the island, calls a friend for a hint, etc.

Once the plot actually starts moving forward and Dahlia has investigated enough, the book becomes a lot more interesting. The reveal was pretty good, although a seasoned mystery reader could definitely guess it. Overall, this was a strange reading experience with a little more cheesy elements than you would want in an atmospheric, creepy thriller.

Thank you to Atria for the ARC via Netgalley!

This was not good.

I huge thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for my advanced copy of The Family Plot!

I am so totally bummed. I really wanted to like this. The plot was super intriguing and I was really excited to read The Family Plot.

Sadly, I do not recommend this book.

Whoa! This book was amazing. I love the eerie twist of the parents being addicted to true crime and naming their kids after people. And then to have them be home schooled and one of their focuses was focusing on serial killers. I’m a murderino and this was right up my avenue. I found the book so engaging from beginning to end, that I had a hard time putting it down. I just had to know what was going on.

Highly recommend for any other murderino out there.