Detailed plot synopsis reviews of The Good Samaritan |
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Honestly, does this make any sense to you?
Laura learns that Janine, her boss at the suicide hotline, is boning her estranged husband Tony. Now she has two people, Janine and Ryan, that she has to kill!
Ryan has a brother who looks like him named Johnny. Johnny finds out what is going on and thinks Ryan is crazy to tangle with a serial killer like Laura. He tells Ryan to go to the police but Ryan says he doesn't have enough evidence to get her convicted. For once Ryan is probably right. He made recordings of Laura telling Ryan to kill himself, but has no recordings of Laura telling any of her victims to do it.
Now that Ryan has very stupidly revealed his real identity to Laura, she does some easy research and finds out that his wife, Charlotte, is one of her victims.
Click here to see the rest of this reviewRyan goes to Janine, Laura's boss at the hotline, and tells Janine that Laura is trying to get people to kill themselves. He gives her his ONLY COPY of recordings of Laura's voice telling him to kill himself. How stupid is that?
Laura sneaks into Ryan's house and rubs out the face of Charlotte in one of his photos. What is the point of that? She's taunting him but what does that accomplish?
Then she breaks into Ryan's house again (why doesn't he change the locks or something?) and pours blood on Charlotte's wedding dress and puts a dead piglet on it, to represent Charlotte's dead baby. Only since this is a British book the author calls the piglet a foetus.
Foetus, heh heh heh.
Ryan is very upset that Laura is mocking his dead wife and baby. He goes to Laura's house and goes crazy. Laura obligingly films his crazy display and then goes and reports him to the police. Now she has it on record that she is the victim and Ryan is the aggressor.
Johnny, Ryan's brother, asked why Ryan didn't mention the bloody wedding dress and pig foetus and his recordings of Laura's voice calling for his suicide to the police. Ryan just shrugs his shoulders and acts like a retard.
Laura gets Effie to accuse Ryan of boning her. She produces the video showing Ryan coming to her home and acting like a madman. She has also planted nudie kid photos on Ryan's computer, which the school also discovers. Ryan gets suspended from his job because the school doesn't like teachers banging their kids.
At this point the story has become disappointing. What we thought was going to be a battle between two smart adversaries has turned into an incredibly one sided battle. How much more interesting the book could have been if the writer had given Laura a capable enemy!
Meanwhile, we learn the real reason Tony refuses to bone Laura. He saw a social workers report which indicated that Laura was a real psychopathic bitch.
Then we learn the story of David/Olly. After her family died, Laura was sent to a foster home run by Sylvia. Sylvia had a son named David and Olly. Yes, he had two names. Olly was a retard. Laura manipulated Olly into attacking Sylvia. Olly killed Syliva. Then, years later, Laura used the hotline to get Olly to kill himself (with Charlotte, Ryan's wife.). This is a lot of names. Are you following all this?
So all this got Tony so upset that he took the kids and moved away from Laura.
Janine confronts Laura about her evil deeds. But first, Laura offers Janine some poisoned muffins and Janine politely eats them. Now, if you knew that the woman you were talking to was a psychokiller, would you eat anything that came from her hand? Probably not. File this away in the "just plain stupid" category, along with Ryan revealing his name and place of work to Laura.
So of course Janine gets drugged and while she is drugged Laura kills her with a hammer. Wack wack wack! We get a lot of description of the different body parts Laura bashes with her hammer. Wack wack wack! Only it isn't Laura's hammer, it's Ryan's hammer, which she stole from his house.
When Janine is dead Ryan is accused of the murder because it is his hammer. Little details, like forensic evidence that might link Laura to the murder and the fact that Laura is the last person to see her alive at the hotline center (which has security cameras), and Laura is the one with the strongest motive to kill Janine (Janine is sleeping with her husband) are glossed over. Laura has arranged an untraceable murder! Just believe it and don't think so hard about this not very credible part of the story.
Ryan is so upset with being accused of murdering Janine that he jumps off a cliff and kills himself. You see my problem with the writing style? Everything is too easily resolved without difficulties. In the real world Laura would be the prime suspect in their murders.
When Laura goes to visit her retard son Henry at the hospital, she finds him in a wheelchair about to be pushed into a lake by Ryan! But Ryan is dead. This is Johnny, his brother, pretending to be Ryan.
Ryan threatens to push Henry into a lake unless Laura makes a videotaped confession about all the people she has killed.
