Never Saw Me Coming by Vera KurianMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Meet Chloe Sevre. She’s a freshman honor student, a leggings-wearing hot girl next door, who also happens to be a psychopath. Her hobbies include yogalates, frat parties, and plotting to kill Will Bachman, a childhood friend who grievously wronged her.
Chloe is one of seven students at her DC-based college who are part of an unusual clinical study for psychopaths—students like herself who lack empathy and can’t comprehend emotions like fear or guilt. The study, led by a renowned psychologist, requires them to wear smart watches that track their moods and movements.
When one of the students in the study is found murdered in the psychology building, a dangerous game of cat and mouse begins, and Chloe goes from hunter to prey. As she races to identify the killer and put her own plan into action, she’ll be forced to decide if she can trust any of her fellow psychopaths—and everybody knows you should never trust a psychopath.
Never Saw Me Coming is a compulsive, voice-driven thriller by an exciting new voice in fiction, that will keep you pinned to the page and rooting for a would-be killer.
Chloe is one of seven students at her DC-based college who are part of an unusual clinical study for psychopaths—students like herself who lack empathy and can’t comprehend emotions like fear or guilt. The study, led by a renowned psychologist, requires them to wear smart watches that track their moods and movements.
When one of the students in the study is found murdered in the psychology building, a dangerous game of cat and mouse begins, and Chloe goes from hunter to prey. As she races to identify the killer and put her own plan into action, she’ll be forced to decide if she can trust any of her fellow psychopaths—and everybody knows you should never trust a psychopath.
Never Saw Me Coming is a compulsive, voice-driven thriller by an exciting new voice in fiction, that will keep you pinned to the page and rooting for a would-be killer.
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Ah, how I wish I reviewed this book as soon as I finished it and not nearly a year later! Because I remember this book was good. Dark secrets, psychopaths (actual, clinically-diagnosed psychopaths, too), unreliable narrators and characters, violence, murder, sexual assault. There's a lot in this book.
Before reading this, I'll confess, I didn't know that much about the clinical diagnosis of psychopathy and what it means to have this diagnosis. I think often the figure of the psychopath is dramatized and over-villainised in popular culture and media, and this was a really interesting read, when two of our narrators were psychopaths involved in a clinical university study into their condition, and a third one was pretending to be a psychopath (I found it interesting how he'd fooled the scientists running the study, but at least one of the others in the study could see right through him).
A lot of the story focuses on Chloe wanting revenge on Will. Her reasons are justified and I found myself routing for her--her lack of guilt or empathy made it a lot easier to route for her, too. I think if this had been a character who wasn't diagnosed as a psychopath, then the lack of guilt may have changed how I viewed her slightly. But Will was an abusive and awful character, and I really felt like Chloe was justified.
Charles is probably the most memorable of the characters, though. He's more thoughtful and contemplative than Chloe, and a lot of the time he's trying to steer his life in a different direction and overcome the social stigma of his diagnosis.
View all my reviews
Ah, how I wish I reviewed this book as soon as I finished it and not nearly a year later! Because I remember this book was good. Dark secrets, psychopaths (actual, clinically-diagnosed psychopaths, too), unreliable narrators and characters, violence, murder, sexual assault. There's a lot in this book.
Before reading this, I'll confess, I didn't know that much about the clinical diagnosis of psychopathy and what it means to have this diagnosis. I think often the figure of the psychopath is dramatized and over-villainised in popular culture and media, and this was a really interesting read, when two of our narrators were psychopaths involved in a clinical university study into their condition, and a third one was pretending to be a psychopath (I found it interesting how he'd fooled the scientists running the study, but at least one of the others in the study could see right through him).
A lot of the story focuses on Chloe wanting revenge on Will. Her reasons are justified and I found myself routing for her--her lack of guilt or empathy made it a lot easier to route for her, too. I think if this had been a character who wasn't diagnosed as a psychopath, then the lack of guilt may have changed how I viewed her slightly. But Will was an abusive and awful character, and I really felt like Chloe was justified.
Charles is probably the most memorable of the characters, though. He's more thoughtful and contemplative than Chloe, and a lot of the time he's trying to steer his life in a different direction and overcome the social stigma of his diagnosis.
View all my reviews
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