Detailed plot synopsis reviews of The Good Samaritan |
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He reveals that Henry is a retard not because of birth complications but because Laura went crazy and burned her house down, not realizing that Henry was in the house. He inhaled so much smoke that he became a retard. That's when Tony took the other kids and moved away. It turns out Laura never had cancer either. She used cancer as an explanation as to why she was locked in a mental hospital for a while.
Suddenly Tony shows up. Tony, believing Johnny is Ryan, beats the crap out of Johnny, in fact beats him so badly that he kills him in a fit of rage. Does anyone believing this believe that Tony, a relatively normal guy, would or could accidently kill someone else with his bare hands?
Click here to see the rest of this reviewLaura's v_gina gets wet watching Tony beating the crap out of Johnny and killing him.
Anyway, now Laura has leverage over her husband Tony. She says that unless Tony obeys her that she will convince the police that Tony murdered Johnny rather than acting in self defense. Tony lets Laura move in with her and the kids even though he worries that Laura will hurt the kids.
So it seems that Laura has killed nearly everyone else in this story and it is the end.
But then Laura gets an email from Janine, which contains an incriminating recording of her voice telling Ryan to kill himself. How can this be? Laura killed Janine with Ryan's hammer.
It turns out that Effie sent the email to her mom using a false email address. Laura used Effie's sister to get her hands on Ryan's recording of Laura's voice, but Effie intercepted her sister and made her own copy. When Effie learned all the nutty things her mom had done she was horrified. When Laura made Effie make false molestation charges against Ryan, everyone in school called Effie a slut, and that made Effie angry at Laura. Furthermore Effie worried that Laura knew that she had provided Johnny with evidence to use against her mother, and that soon her mother would try to kill her.
So Effie decides to use her copy of Laura's incriminating audio recording to drive Laura crazy and/or make the tape public.
The end.
Yes, that's the end of the story. After all this effort to build Laura up into a terrible villain, we are robbed of the resolution of the story. Does Effie succeed in getting Laura locked up, either in a mental hospital or jail? Does Laura find out that Effie is behind this effort and kill her first? We never find out. What a ridiculous ending.
Literary Criticism:
This book had such tremendous potential in its first hundred pages. It was refreshingly original: a woman working for a suicide hotline actively working to undermine the very purpose of the hotline. It makes the reader want to read more to find out why this woman was crazy and what made her this way. Laura was clearly unlikeable, but that didn't prevent the reader from wanting to find out what was going on.
But the rest of the book was a disappointment. The next hundred pages, Ryan's back story, filled us in on what we already knew: that Laura was the killer. Then Ryan and Laura, after trying to kill each other, settle on doing childish pranks, which is totally counterintuitive. Laura is a psychopath, and after Charlotte's death, Ryan becomes a psychopath. They should be trying, given their personalities, to kill each other constantly, not insulting their children or scribbling on family photos.
When Ryan revealed himself and where he worked to Laura, he gave up the game. He had so much promise when he confronted her in the house where he tricked her into thinking he was about to kill himself. The battle between two equally intelligent psychopaths would have been very dramatic. But after that scene, Ryan acts like he has brain damage and he lets Laura destroy him.
Disappointing.
My other problem with this book is that a lot of key plot points are unbelievable.
1) Suicide notes. Most people who kill themselves leave suicide notes. Sooner or later Laura should have expected to be discovered.
2) Phoning Laura. We are repeatedly told there is no direct line to reach Laura, that she is part of a huge phone bank at the suicide hotline. So her victims, who speak to her many times, would have to call dozens of times to try to randomly reach her each time they want to talk to her. This is totally unbelievable and a big problem with the story that is never really addressed.
3) Laura's motive is unclear. Laura enjoys watching people die. But why? She was messed up when she unknowingly participated in the death of her family, helping to prepare the deadly drink under her father's direction. That might make her feel guilty. That might make her feel anxious. But why would that make her want to kill other people, to enjoy killing other people? That connection is never convincingly explained.
