She Treads Softly: A Killer Motive

Saturday, August 30, 2025

A Killer Motive

A Killer Motive by Hannah Mary McKinnon
9/9/25; 400 pages
MIRA

A Killer Motive by Hannah Mary McKinnon is a very highly recommended tension-packed thriller. Once this thriller takes off it is impossible to put down.

Six years ago Stella Dixon's almost eighteen-year-old brother Max slipped out of the house and went with her and her boyfriend Jeff to a beach party. Then Max disappeared without a trace. Now Stella and Jeff are married and she has a true crime podcast, A Killer Motive. When she is interviewed on a local radio someone calls in and asks why she isn't looking for her brother Max, Stella says if she had just one more clue she'd find Max. Someone took this seriously and starts a dangerous game where they make the rules.

This well-written, lightning-fast-paced psychological thriller gets better and more intense as the plot unfolds. Once the deadly game initiated by someone using the code-name Anwir starts, Stella knows that she can't tell anyone or people will die. Whoever Anwir is, they know everything Stella says or does. When you start reading the tension and stress ramp up very quickly and explodes as it heads toward the shocking ending.

Stella is a believable, fully realized, intelligent character with strengths and weaknesses. She is also a sympathetic character and you will want her to get through this and find closure. All the other characters are portrayed as realistic individuals with flaws. Everyone is a suspect, you'll get whiplash considering which character is responsible.

Readers will be very well rewarded if they set some disbelief aside and go with the plot. Admittedly, very early on when Stella receives the first two anonymous emails from AL and subsequently deletes everything, I questioned her actions and wondered why she didn't immediately go directly to the police to at least have it on record. Of course, this action would have changed the entire novel. The last half of the novel makes up for any initial doubts I had.

A Killer Motive would be an excellent choice for anyone who enjoys fast-paced psychological thrillers. Thanks to MIRA for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.