Always the First to Die by R.J. Jacobs

​I’ve been very selective with my mystery thrillers lately. I blame the genre. It’s long ago done away with quality control in the name of quantity and thus too many mediocrities are floating out there, promising but failing to thrill.  But this one…this one seemed different.
Was it the comparisons to Riley Sager? No, not as much as the combination of genres or more like a combination of media formats in the same genre – doing its best to scare you with literary and cinematic at once.
So yeah, impossible to resist a good story set amid the movie making world. Or possible, but why would you?
Florida Keys (playing the setting as a character here) is a place my fiancé raves about but in books I’d read it always seems to be on the verge of obliteration. And here, once again, it’s being hurricaned into oblivion while one devoted mother is desperately trying to get her daughter out of the clutches of her evil/maybe evil grandpa (the woman’s father-in-law) who is just about the most famous director of scary movies there is making a sequel to the most famous movie he’s made.
Something sinister is going on at the movie set, but is it the director, well-known for pranking and terrifying his actors into their best frightened performances or something more? Natural or supernatural, but there’s something spooky in a decidedly haunted estate on the Keys.
So there you go, a fun premise done right. An exciting, well-written and well-paced thriller that competently mingles the wordly with the otherworldly, while sustaining the claustrophobic suspense throughout.
The genre prerequisite twist ending, to be fair, was something of a letdown. Perfectly decent but might leave you wanting more. The plot had so much more than that, it seems, to merely devolve into yet another family situation (can’t say more than that, you’ll just have to read to find out). But other than that, a fun ride through and through. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.