Man, this was hard to get through. Honestly, it was sluggish from start to finish for me with annoying characters and so many moments deserving of an eye roll. It was too far fetched for me to really get into, and I found my attention fading every page or so. Unfortunately, I won’t be reading again.

This is one of those books where the blurb is more exciting than the book. The plot is so dominated by lengthy dry conversations that it is difficult to feel any emotional connection to the characters. What could have been a thrilling read ended up being a slog to get through.

Thanks to NetGalley and Crooked Lane for the advanced reader copy.

The premise to this book--that a night time talk show host creates a crowdsourced list of the worst people in New York and those people start dying--was interesting and sounded like a good plot. Unfortunately, I couldn't hang with this book because the writing made it clear that the author isn't American, in ways that kept me from being able to sink into the story. In the chapters centered on the police detective, who is American, and is working in New York, there were too many British-centered words and phrases that made it feel unrealistic that the book was happening in New York. It might seem like a small thing but consistently seeing distances measured in kilometers and having lawyers referred to as councilmen, made it hard to just sit back and enjoy the story.

The Ten Worst People in New York by Matt Platt is a great full length debut novel. Nighttime television host Ricky Talon has a list of ten truly hideous individuals living in New York and one-by-one they keep ending up dead, but by different means. Told from multiple perspectives, from people on the list, to an FBI agent trying to solve the crimes, in addition to others seemingly unconnected to it all. Can they solve the mystery before another member of the list is murdered?

Also, a personal aside, as someone with living with chronic migraine, I appreciate the way the disease is unflinchingly portrayed. It is shown to be painful and unpredictable, which is completely true to life. As someone who has seen this disease brushed off as a small nuisance and just a tiny little inconvenience, I greatly appreciated the inclusion of such truthful commentary.

I really enjoyed this exciting, fast paced thriller. Told from multiple perspectives, it kept me guessing until the last chapter, throwing out multiple twist and plot along the way. I didn’t ever figure it all out which is my mark of a good thriller. Five stars, definite recommend.

I received this advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review and feedback.

This is such a cool concept, and I really liked the way it started. Unfortunately as the story went on it felt disjointed, like it skipped over a number of important facts - like, for example, the third death - and pieces seemed to be missing to the extent that the narrative felt full of holes. Add to that a rather dry writing style and characters that were introduced and seemed to have great potential to be interesting components of the story but whose personalities were never fleshed out in any way that allowed you to connect to them or understand why they were behaving as they were, and the result is a bit of a jumble... There is interesting stuff here, but you have to work pretty hard and accept a lot of things on faith to tie all the pieces together. This one was a bit of a miss for me...

I honestly didn’t give this book much of a chance before DNFing it so I gave it 3 stars. I just didn’t find the story compelling and it made for very slow reading for me.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy of this book.

I really liked the premise of the book. The ten worst people in New York dying/being killed off, one by one. I liked the main character, FBI Agent Alex Bedford. I found it somewhat distracting keeping tract of all the character names from the List.

3 out of 5 ⭐️

I loved the idea of the book and the general writing of the author. The plot twists were crazy but I have to be honest that between the twists I got bored sometimes. And there were so many different names that it was hard to follow for the first few chapters.

I really enjoyed this as a psychological thriller, it had that overall feel that I was looking for and enjoyed the concept that I was looking for. Matt Plass wrote this well and I was on the edge of my seat. The killer element was really well done and was glad I got to read this.

After a late night tv show lists the 10 worst people in New York, they begin to die suspicious deaths, pulling a retired FBI agent out of retirement to try to connect the dots