REVIEW ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The Family Plot by Megan Collins is a gothic suspense about a dark family obsessed with true crime who gathers to bury their patriarch. In preparation for the burial they make a chilling discovery—a body is already in their father’s grave. Then they learn that the body is Andy’s, the family’s youngest son who left abruptly at the age of sixteen. Could this be the work of the serial killer who has terrorized the island for decades? Dahlia, Andy’s twin, slowly discovers details from the past that raise more questions than they answer. Consumed with grief, Dahlia is determined to find out what really happened to her brother and in the process unearths horrible and terrifying secrets long held by this eccentric family. ⠀
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At the beginning of this book I was a bit uncertain how I felt about this death obsessed family in a gothic mansion on an isolated island. But Megan Collins had me hooked by chapter two. And as one deadly secret at a time begins to be unraveled I found myself not being able to read fast enough to find out where this was all leading. The story, told from Dahlia Lighthouse’s point-of-view, manages to give these characters an air of vulnerability. You can’t help but empathize with them and the life they endured all the while wondering why you are not horrified by them. At times it feels a bit like the Addams Family sans the humor. The plot unfolds slowly and methodically allowing the reader to savor each new revelation, but by no means does the pace lag. This is one suspense/thriller/mystery that will not quickly fade from your memory. This had all the potential of being a five-star read but I just felt that the ending fell flat. I am not certain what I expected but I just sensed it needed something more. However, that does not hinder me from highly recommending this book. Its unique weirdness makes it an intriguing and darkly delightful tale from a mega talented author.

The Family Plot is the latest book from Megan Collins. At times this story is a little slow, but it is well worth hanging in there. Lots of family secrets that eventually find daylight. I want to thank NetGalley and Atria Books for an early copy to review.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Atria Books for gifting me a digital ARC of the latest book by Megan Collins - 4 creepy stars!

Dahlia grew up in a remote island mansion that was dubbed "Murder Mansion" by the townspeople. That's because Dahlia's mom was obsessed with murder victims after her parents were killed. She named each of her 4 children after famous victims, she homeschooled them by having them learn about true crime incidents and writing murder reports. Dahlia's twin brother, Andy, disappeared after their 16th birthday and Dahlia has been searching for him ever since. When their father dies, Dahlia returns home for the first time in years along with her two older siblings only to have the family discover that Andy is buried in their father's plot.

Definitely for those fascinated with true crime, as the names of victims and crimes are prevalent. There is more than one murder to solve here and plenty of suspicious characters. Plenty of unresolved grief, childhood trauma and family secrets to round out the plot. The book and setting are creepy and disturbing but will keep you turning the pages to find out all the answers.

Another great book from Megan Collins!! And this one is my new favorite!

The family plot follows a broken family, one that is obsessed with true crime. In fact they are so obsessed that they’re all named after famous murder victims… a creepy enough upbringing that they left home as soon as they could and never returned, until now. Now they are home to hurry their father, except there’s already someone in his grave… the brother they thought ran away.

This mystery was full of all the twists, turns and suspense I wanted. And as an added bonus, it was also full of ton of true crime trivia! I loved it so much! Order your copy now!

Dahlia narrates this creepy tale of an incredibly odd family and murder. Her parents were so obsessed with serial killers that they named their children after them and home schooled them on the subject. Dahlia's twin Andy disappeared when they were sixteen and now, ten years later, just as she, her sister Tate and brother Charlie have returned home for their father's funeral, his body is found. Who killed him? Who is the serial killer taking women on Blackburn Island? It might take a bit of patience but this one twists around several times. No spoilers from me. Collins has a good storytelling style and the plot is unusual enough to keep you reading past when you should put the book down. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. Creepy is definitely the word to describe these people.

This was a great story! I loved the characters, well maybe some were love/hate but nonetheless. The siblings closeness was a bit much in my opinion, but overall a phenomenal story!

This book gives me thrills! I did not expect the ending, end this book is so scary, thrilling, and creepy all at the same time! Reading this book makes me scared as can be that I have to make sure all the doors are lock and no one can get in🤣 I can not stop reading this! So spooky but it's definitely a page turner and you definnitely want to know the ending ASAP! Highly recommended for those who love thrillers/mystery wih spooky settings. Thank you do much to NetGalley and Atria Books for the free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

“Were you one of those color-outside-the-line sort of kids? That doesn’t mean you’re creative, you know, it means you’re wrong.”

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The Lighthouse family is the Addams Family meets The Royal Tenenbaums. They are quirky, insular, devoted to each other and completely obsessed with murder. The island they live on has been haunted by a serial killer and their lives have been focused on solving this crime and honoring murder victims.

Dahlia and her siblings are brought home by the death of her father, all except for her twin brother, Andy, who fled the home years ago and never spoke to any of them again. When they go to bury her father they discover Andy's body. Dahlia is horrified and determined to find out what happened. Her remaining brother and sister involve themselves in macabre memorial projects that are absolutely insane would they be any other people in any other family.

There are some interesting twists along the way and regardless of the underlying mystery, these are just interesting characters to read about. I was hoping for a slightly different ending but I was satisfied with where it landed.

Thanks to Netgalley for a copy of this novel. All opinions above are my own.

The Lighthouse family lives in a secluded mansion on Blackburn Island. Obsessed with true crime stories, all the children in the family are named after the victims of famous serial killers. When the father, Daniel dies, all of the children come back to the house for his funeral.

Dahlia Lighthouse, now 26 years old, has been searching for her missing twin brother Andy for quite some time. After their sixteenth birthday, Andy disappeared only leaving behind a note. As the family cemetery plot is being prepared to bury Daniel, they are surprised to find a body already buried there. And it is Andy’s body! Things get very interesting from this point. Someone in this family is holding secrets to explain Andy’s death and burial.

Megan Collins brings to life the freakiest family ever! The creepy factor is off the scale in this story of a serial killer obsessed and totally dysfunctional family. This dark, twisted, and intense psychological thriller is masterfully written and never boring. I can highly recommend THE FAMILY PLOT for anyone looking for something a bit different and a bit shocking.

Many thanks to Atria Books for my ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This review will be posted to my Instagram Blog (@coffee.break.book.reviews) on August 13, 2021.

pub date: 8/17/2021 by atria books
thanks to @atriabooks and @netgalley for the free e-arc provided for an honest review.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

wow, this isn’t going to be an easy book to review without spoilers, but i’ll try!

this book has a really fascinating and page turning beginning: a girl goes home for the first time in eight years after her father passes away. when she gets there and they open up the plot already set up for her father, a body has already been there long enough to completely decompose.

what!!!

i love thriller and mystery novels and this one started with a bang. megan collins is really good at keeping you on the edge of your seat and giving you a ton of suspects right from the beginning so your brain starts trying to figure out who did it. because this is definitely a whodoneit novel. my brain went through probably at least five different possible suspects and also looked at all the people on the outskirts with a side-eye 👀. truly thought it could be anyone!

i’m not particularly sure why, it’s not really anything like it, but the family plot gave me knives out vibes. i think just a family member being killed and a detective coming in very quickly is what made me think of it. also, huge, creepy house? i don’t know, but i loved it!

megan’s writing keeps you engaged and i definitely stayed awake longer than i should have several nights because i didn’t want to stop reading. every night was a wanting to know what happens but my eyes won’t stay open because meds situation.

highly recommend this book and also megan’s book behind the red door. i haven’t read the winter sister yet, but i’m pretty sure it’s amazing too!

This was an enjoyable read- kind of like a murder mystery. It features a really odd family, who were raised in a way very different from you or I. And once they all come home, secrets unravel. And it isn't until near the end that big things get revealed. I was surprised, entertained, and drawn in. I shed a tear near the end, as some of it was just so tragic really. I guess that's more how I would describe it. A tragic mystery. I thought there would be more suspense or something, but that's okay. I enjoyed the story.

*3.5 stars rounded up.

'Where does she come up with these ideas?' my mother used to say when she'd read something she thought was off the wall and preposterous. I'm sure that would have been her opinion of the Lighthouse family in this new character-driven thriller from Megan Collins. Collins herself refers to them as 'this strange and unsettling family' in her acknowledgements.

The plot: Dahlia Lighthouse, 26, returns to her family's mansion on a secluded island, reachable only by ferry, after learning that her father, Daniel, has passed away. Her older siblings, Charlie and Tate, have returned too. The only one missing is Dahlia's twin brother, Andy, who disappeared ten years ago on his 16th birthday. But as Fritz, the groundskeeper, prepares the family plot where Daniel will be laid to rest, he discovers Andy's remains buried there. Who could have killed and hidden his body...and why?

The Lighthouse children lived isolated lives growing up in the 'Murder Mansion,' as it was dubbed by locals, and were home-schooled by their eccentric mother on true-crime cases; in fact; they are each named after well-known murder victims. Their island even has its own famous serial killer, called the Blackburn Killer--his victims, all young women washed up by the ocean in ice-blue dresses. But the murders stopped suddenly ten years ago...

The plot really keeps the reader guessing. In fact, I had an entirely-different scenario all figured out, lol. The take-away seems to be that we can never really know another human being, even one as close as a twin. This is a thriller you can gobble up quickly--a great summer beach read.

I received an arc of this new thriller via Net-Galley in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks for an entertaining reading experience that even my mother would have c0me to like.
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“The only way out is to never come back”

Dahlia Lighthouse had a very different childhood. She and her siblings grew up in a house nicknamed the murder mansion, where they were homeschooled by her mother. Instead of learning a traditional curriculum, they studied serial killers. Ironically, there is a serial killer on the loose on the remote island where they live.

Ten years ago, Dahlia’s twin brother Andy disappeared. She has spent every day since trying to find him. When her father unexpectedly dies, she returns home to the family mansion for the funeral. When the family plot is being prepared for her father, Andy’s body is found buried beneath. Who killed Andy? Who is the Blackburn killer?

This book started out with so much promise. I was immediately intrigued by a super original plot and Dahlia is a very likable narrator. Although completely ridiculous, I found myself immediately interested in this odd family. Collins does a fantastic job of making all of the characters suspects, but this story just lost steam and became repetitive at the halfway mark. I’m all for suspending my belief, but too much of this just didn’t make sense to me.

3/5 stars

Thank you to Edelweiss, NetGalley, and Atria books for the ARC of The Family Plot by Megan Collins in exchange for an honest review.

What a solid thriller! This was a quick read for me, as I read in a few hours during the afternoon, and I just couldn't put it down. Collins writes so clearly that I couldn't help but feel I was walking behind Dahlia for the extent of the novel.

The premise is grim. Dahlia and her family live in a mansion that the locals call Murder Mansion due to the family's obsession with murder. The island was the center of the Blackburn murders completed by a serial killer over a period of many years. Her twin brother Andy disappeared on their 16th birthday and was never found. Until the siblings return to bury their father and find Andy in their father's grave- murdered.

Dahlia learns that her family has not always been transparent, and even she closed them off throughout much of her life. There are several side characters who are extremely well-developed and add a lot to the story as well. There are several twists and turns, including two major ones at the end that I could never have seen coming.

Content warnings: murder, child abuse (psychological), violence against women, death of a child

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Loved this book! Took me a little bit to get into it, it was slow to start, but once I got hooked, it was hard to put down! First book I've read by this author and I'm looking forward to reading more.

(The following review will run on CriminalElement.com the week of the book's publication.)

Dahlia Lighthouse had a most unusual upbringing.

Growing up on the secluded Blackburn Island would be strange enough. But Dahlia and her siblings — Charlie, Tate, and Andy — were also named after infamous murder victims. Their true crime-obsessed mother assigned “murder reports” instead of book reports in a homeschool curriculum centered around violent death. Rather than attend weekly services at a nearby church, the family held Honoring ceremonies to remember those cut down too soon. And the Lighthouses’ massive home has long been dubbed the “Murder Mansion” by the leery locals.


My parents named me Dahlia, after the Black Dahlia — that actress whose body was cleaved in half, left in grass as sharp as scalpels, a permanent smile sliced onto her face — and when I first learned her story at four years old, I assumed a knife would one day carve me up. My namesake was a part of me, my future doomed by her violent death. That meant my oldest brother, Charlie, who had escaped the Lindbergh baby’s fate by living past age two, would still be abducted someday. My sister, Tate, would follow in her own namesake’s footsteps, become a movie star, then become a body in a pool of blood. And my twin brother, Andy, named for Lizzie Borden’s father — I was sure his head was destined for the ax.
It didn’t take me long to shed that belief, to understand that our names were just one of the many ways we honored victims of murder. But even after I stopped expecting us all to be killed, Andy insisted our family was “unnatural,” that the way we were raised wasn’t right.


Each of the Lighthouse children left home after coming of age and into their inheritances. Each except Andy, Dahlia’s twin, who ran away on their sixteenth birthday, who left behind a note with just a single line as an explanation. Dahlia has spent the last decade trying to track down her beloved brother, scouring the internet for any sign of him, and only returns to the island out of necessity when the family’s patriarch dies.

But Dahlia and the remaining Lighthouses are in for a horrible shock. It turns out there’s already a body in their father’s grave. Andy’s body. And buried with him is the ax that killed him.


On our thirteenth birthday, Andy carved his name into the wall beneath my bedroom window. We should go, he said, concentrating on the knife. We’re old enough now to figure things out on our own.
At thirteen, I was still scared to venture too far beyond our door. It wasn’t until I was nineteen, living without Andy for three years already, that it became scarier to walk the halls of a house where I could only trail after his ghost.
I didn’t know, then, that “ghost” was not a metaphor. That whatever slip of energy that made him him had already detached from his skin, or that his skin itself was a disintegrating thing, a feast for grubs and worms.
But how could I not have known? For ten years, I’ve watched for him, searched for him, worn out the letters of his name on my laptop keys — certain that he was out there, his heart still beating in sync with mine. I always thought that, if he died, I’d feel it, like a coffin snapping shut on my own body.
But all this time, I’ve been breathing just fine; all this time, I’ve been wrong.


Who killed Andy, and why? Is there a connection to the Blackburn Killer, the island’s serial killer, now dormant for many years? Was it one of the locals who always suspected the Lighthouses of being Satanists, who perhaps hated them enough to strike one of them down?

Desperate for answers, justice, and closure, Dahlia begins to dig into the events surrounding her and Andy’s sixteenth birthday. But the deeper she digs, the more darkness that wells to the surface, until she’s sinking into dangerous secrets and crushing heartbreak.

The Family Plot is equal parts gothic chiller — with its ominous big house, remote forested island setting, and peculiar family cocooned in an insular world of their own making — and true crime love letter. Or perhaps it’s more a word of warning; while Collins peppers the plot with numerous references to infamous cases, she also shows how dangerous it can be to wallow too long in the horror and sorrow of murder. You know what they say about staring too long into an abyss…


“I mourned and I mourned and I mourned,” Mom says, her palms open in front of her, as if she’s remembering the weight of her grief, trying to hold it in her hands. “And do you want to know the only thing that comforted me?” She closes her eyes, breathes in deeply, then opens them again. “Murder.”
Tate grips my arm. I look at her, but she’s focused on Mom. Charlie’s glaring at the floor.
“Not the committing of it. But the stories. Stories of gruesome, real-life murders. Stories where people are left behind to grieve someone who was torn away from them. Stories where the… the terrible cruelty of life was so absolute.” Fresh tears dampen her lashes. “Undeniable. …I had newspapers and books and films and endless, endless stories of people like me. People who existed in the interviews. People who said, ‘She was so full of life, I don’t understand how she’s gone.’ Or ‘I’ll never be over it.’” She pauses, her expression now blank. “I think of those lines all the time. Living inside those stories gave me something I hadn’t had before: validation for my grief.”


This is a story with a built-in overcast atmosphere. You can practically feel and hear the whistle of the constant ocean wind; there are moments that’ll make you wish you had a sweater, even if the closest thermometer reads 89 degrees. With Dahlia’s voice in our ears, everything is laced with grief, and guilt, and ominous tension — if you’re looking for a light and cozy yarn, this most definitely will not suit. But if you want something weighty, textured, substantial, painted in shades of grey? Collins has absolutely delivered a solid tale.

The Family Plot is, at its heart, about generational curses and how difficult it can be to overcome the past. It’s a tragic tale in more than one way, but in the end Collins offers us a ray of hope rather than nihilistic gloom. Is this something brand new and unexpected? Not really. But Collins navigates around familiar beats, expected tropes, and some slightly predictable reveals with assurance, and keeps her focus more on the characters than the twists, which pays off with compelling emotional resonance. Sure, I called most of the Big Moments in advance — but I was still satisfied by them, and all of the little pieces slotted into place quite nicely by the climax. This is one that I’m excited to recommend to anyone who grew up devouring Ann Rule, or is obsessed with Unsolved Mysteries, or never misses an installment of My Favorite Murder.

A creepy family to say the least, but aren’t all family’s a little off? Dahlia has been looking for her brother for years after he disappeared. When her father dies, and everyone comes home for the funeral, she finally finds out what happened to Andy.

My favorite Megan Collins to date! I love the true crime angle to this novel, where a family obsessed with true crime is forced to solve their own crime when they discover a body in their family plot. Lots of creepy characters and twists and turns!

The Family Plot by Megan Collins

Over the years, I have tried to enjoy more and more different types of thrillers. I would consider The Family Plot a different type of thriller. It was a terrifying, exciting, and still thrilling psychological novel that left my brain twisted in a knot.

When family members, the Lighthouse’s, meet on Blackburn Island for a memorial, things start taking a turn for the worse. Blackburn Island has been known for suspicious murders by a serial killing that is still on the loose. This begins spiraling out of control for Dahlia Lighthouse who starts searching for clues for a brother that went missing when she was younger.

I found The Family Plot a fun, entertaining read. At some points, I did find myself with a confused look on my face, as I can’t really relate to a family who could own an island if they desired. It definitely had a strong resemblance to the movie Knives Out, which was based around a rich family trying to solve a crime. I did, however, still find this an enjoyable read, and I look forward to whatever this author writes next.

3.5 stars, rounded up. True crime has gone majorly mainstream over the last few years, and this book shows what happens when one family's obsession with it goes too far. There are a lot of strange fictional families, but the Lighthouses are genuinely one of the most dysfunctional, messed up families I've read in a long time, in a unique and train wreck fascinating way. This one is consistently shocking and will get readers thinking.