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Synopsis:

When a horror-loving radio show becomes the stage of a gruesome murder, its host Tinsel Monroe is put next on the killer’s list…
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Tinsel Munroe’s dream of working in radio hasn’t turned out to be everything she hoped it would. Sure, she has her own show – the aptly titled The Graveyard Shift – where she celebrates the sounds of horror-cinema. It’s a pop cultural oasis for the niche audience she has cultivated, but the wage is barely enough to cover her rent and the midnight hours are putting a strain on her relationship with tattooist boyfriend, Zack. After three years at Melbourne’s coolest station, she’s seemingly no closer to a prime-time slot.

That is, until someone is murdered live on air. 

Mistaking it for a Halloween prank at first, a visit from police informs Tinsel that the hysterical call was, in fact, the real deal. She is freaked out by the horrible incident, but her true-crime obsessed sister Pandora is fascinated by it. 

While detectives assure them the killer will soon be caught, the bodies continue to drop with the killer striking at locations tied to Australian film history in increasingly gruesome ways. With a growing, macabre audience to her radio show, that potentially includes the killer, Tinsel begins receiving strange messages over the text lines. Her home and her workplace suddenly aren’t the sanctuaries she once thought they were. 

Tinsel and her sister are left no choice but to team up with Detective James as they race to find the connection between her and the culprit. The people she thought she could trust are now those she should fear the most. In order to survive, Tinsel is going to have to listen to more than just the airwaves…

Review:

Tinsel Munroe is an overnight radio DJ who specializes in all things spooky. This includes creepy music and horror movies (I actually listened to some of the songs she played on her show while reading, which made for a great soundtrack for Tinsel’s life) . When a person dies on the air while trying to win tickets to the premiere of the new Joe Meyer movie, Band Candy, Tinsel’s life turns into a dangerous game of finding the girl’s killer and trying not to be the next target herself.

There are some interesting elements to this mystery. I like Tinsel, the life that she lives above a pub with her tattoo boyfriend, surrounded by interesting music and movies (both premieres and hosting a Halloween movie marathon). Her sister, Pandora runs a true crime blog, and both of them seem to be interesting people to be around. The setting of Melbourne and many scenes placed at Tinsel’s radio station job and movie theaters adds to the appeal of this novel, but the execution of the plot just did not capture me like it should have. The plot feels fatty. Maria Lewis spends a great deal of time on things that are insignificant. There is almost as much time spent on why Tinsel should not wear open toed shoes in a mechanic’s garage as the motive for all of the killings in the book. A disproportionate amount of time is spent on the fact that Tinsel and Pandora are adopted because it has absolutely zero to do with the plot in the end. For a mystery and thriller, this novel is not sharp at all, but just soft and mostly meandering toward the ending.

The Graveyard Shift has some interesting ideas, but it does not seem like the ideas are enough to carry the plot for four hundred pages. The mystery elements are fairly weak. We are given a red herring suspect that we do not believe for one second is the culprit, and we are also given a cliche male cop who is there to save this damsel in distress, while falling in love with her. This has the pieces to be a really great horror-tinged thriller, but instead it is soft and mostly uninteresting, with an ending that feels rushed and not as well plotted as it could have been. 

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.