A review by deannafemchonk
Sinister Legacy by Harleigh Beck

4.0

The angel on my shoulder wants me to confess. The devil cuts her neck. We won’t breathe a word, he whispers to me, slithering through my veins. They deserved it. I listen. I let it soothe me. They touched you. Used you. Defiled you.

This is my second novel by Harleigh Beck, my first one being [b:Sweet Taste of Betrayal: An Erotic Horror Novella|63024220|Sweet Taste of Betrayal An Erotic Horror Novella|Harleigh Beck|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1666016406l/63024220._SY75_.jpg|96218950]. This is told in multiple, first person pov and is erotic-horror with a dark romance subplot. In this book we follow Kiera Hill, whose father is a notorious serial killer due to be put to death by the death penalty. Beneath the facade of a good girl who is dating the lucky star quarterback, she is decaying inside. After school badboy King Knight gets challenged to a dare to sleep with her, a series of murders and attacks reveals that there is a copy-cat murderer in town. This book is trigger warnings for 90% of the book! So be warned that there is lots of gore, lots of dub-con and cnc, as well as sexual assault and abuse of minors. The characters are all flawed. I see a lot of other reviews swoon for King and gave it 5 stars probably solely because of him, and while I disagree with that rating scale to each their own I suppose.

I had a difficult time figuring out how to rate this novel. There are a lot of themes that were extremely uncomfortable, largely having to do with the fact that most of the main characters are all minors and in high school. My question was do I rate this based on how I personally felt about a lot of the situations? Or do I rate it based off how successful I felt the feelings that I think the author meant to provoke? I decided to go with the latter; this book definitely kept me at the edge of my seat, made me cringe because of the graphic content, and is definitely in the top of most unhinged books I've ever read (so far). For this I give it 4/5 stars as it was definitely impressionable and made me feel some strong emotions, but if asked as a recommendation for someone who has never read in this genre before it would definitely not be my first pick to get your toes wet.

I may have given this a higher rating if I felt a little more satisfied with the conclusion.

Spoiler

I felt like the reveal of the killers at the end was so..random. I guess I definitely didn't see it coming, but it didn't make much sense. It was a very unsatisfying 'ah-hah' moment.

As mentioned before 90% of the book is spent describing graphic content. I may have given this a higher rating if there was maybe a bit more focus describing the mystery or exploring the more psychological horror aspects in this novel. Perhaps that may be more my personal bias for psychological horror vs gore or body horror though. I will probably read more works by this author.