Spider to the Fly by J.H. Markert
Narrator: Wayne Mitchell, Xe Sands, Vanessa Moyen
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: crime thriller, horror, psychological thriller, thriller
Pages: 352
Length: 10 hours and 22 minutes
Published by Crooked Lane Books, Spotify on September 2, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A true crime author helps in a desperate hunt for a killer in this dark and twisted thriller from the deviously inventive horror author that Peter Farris calls the “clear heir to Stephen King.”

Perfect for fans of cat and mouse serial killer thrillers like The Butcher and the Wren and The Jigsaw Man.

Ellie Isles first became obsessed with the I-64 murders when she saw her own face on one of the victims. Identical to every detail, the woman wasn’t her, but she could have been. Compelled to discover the story of her dopplegänger’s death, Ellie wrote a bestselling true crime book about the serial killer, dubbed “the Spider.”

Four years later, the Spider still hasn't been caught, and his victim count is climbing. Many of the bodies remain unidentified, but with Ellie’s online network of true crime followers, that’s slowly changing. Together they’ve pooled information to create a massive database that tracks people at risk of becoming Jane and John Does–the homeless, the drug addicted, and the downtrodden–with the hopes that if they become victims, they might at least be identified.

Now that Ellie has successfully identified multiple victims, the law enforcement task force tracking down the Spider pulls her in to help–and after Ellie’s therapist is arrested for the murders, she is more determined than ever to help catch the Spider.

With striking prose and a horror flair, Spider to the Fly is an engrossing serial killer thriller, perfect for fans of The Whisper Man.

My Review:

We begin with just the sort of thing that lets the reader know that this story is going to go to some very dark places. Because it begins with three children being abandoned by their father at what appears to be the worst sort of orphanage without a backward glance.

We don’t learn that the place was even worse than we imagined it to be until much, much later.

Because the story shifts from those children to an entirely different child decades later. Twelve -year-old Amber Isles is trying to draw her exhausted mother Ellie’s attention to the TV. Because her mom’s face is on it. But it’s not her mom.

And that’s where the story kicks Ellie in the gut, changes the course of her life and propels everything into a high and panicky kind of gear. The face on the TV screen, the one that looks EXACTLY like Ellie’s, is the face of Sherry Brock, one of the adopted children of the richest and most influential family in tiny Ransom, Kentucky. Sherry Brock is dead, the 17th victim of the serial killer known as ‘The Spider’ because all of the Spider’s victims have been found by the side of I-64 as it crosses Kentucky, poisoned by numerous bites from the most venomous breeds of arachnids.

That uncanny resemblance between Ellie Isles and Sherry Brock leaves Ellie convinced that Sherry is her twin. Ellie was an orphan raised in foster care, Sherry was an orphan who was adopted by the Brock Family and they are exactly the same age so – the idea that they might be twins isn’t outside the bounds of possibility.

In her search for connection – and for a driving focus to keep her own nightmares at bay, Ellie Isles becomes an expert on the Spider and especially his victims. Her best-selling true crime book on the subject, Bloody Highway, brings her recognition and continually increasing book royalties, as sales of her book rise with the discovery of each new victim.

When the Spider’s 29th victim is discovered, the pieces of the puzzle that has consumed Ellie’s life start falling into place – as do the vague and shadowy memories of Ellie’s life before she was left, as if by a very large stork, at the age of eight in front of an orphanage with no memory of her early life or how she got there in the first place.

At the same time, the vast, influential house of cards that was the life of the Brock family disintegrates right before the eyes of a fascinated but horrifying town. The elder Brocks, Brad and Karina, are dead as the result of a massive house fire. A crime that their oldest adopted son, Ian, confesses to but claims he can’t remember.

But Ellie’s missing memories have started shaking loose. And so have the memories of a lot of others, all of whom were once orphaned children being traumatized and experimented on at a place called ‘The Farm’. And they all remember Ian Brock, the boy who terrified every single one of them in brutal games of ‘The Spider and the Fly’.

Unless, Ian Brock, like his sister Sherry, had a twin. An evil twin. But which twin was he?

Escape Rating A+: This book sits at an uncomfortable place for this reader, spiked right on the barbed wire fence between horror and thriller. It is absolutely riveting – and at the same time I couldn’t make myself linger long with it each day and I could not convince myself to read it at night. It’s that kind of compellingly uncomfortable story.

Which made it a perfect candidate for an audiobook, as well as simply a damn good audiobook, because I got just enough each day to give my anticipation of the next day’s installment a delicious shiver of dread.

From one perspective, this is about the hunt for a serial killer, which is one way that I work myself into both horror and thrillers. I can get caught up trying to solve the puzzle and distance myself from the horror enough to get into the story.

In this story, tracking down the Spider is clearly Ellie’s obsession, but that obsession may honestly be the mentally healthiest part of her personality – and that’s a scary thing to say in a much different way. She is personally involved because of her resemblance to Sherry Brock, and it’s made even more personal because of the way the Brocks treated her when she tried to reach out.

But the death of the older Brocks changes the story. Of course, at first, it’s all about the scandal. Because of course it’s a scandal.

More than that, the death of the older Brocks kicks over an anthill. Or perhaps that should be tears down a spider’s web. Their deaths remove their wealth and influence, and their long-held secrets begin scurrying out into the light. And in those secrets is the true horror behind, not just the lives of their now adult adopted children, but the lives of all the children like Ellie who were imprisoned on ‘The Farm’.

I found the book’s most horrific moments – and the real-life horrors of experimental children’s hospitals like the Fernald Center (look up Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center and be prepared to be horrified) that they were based on, to be even more terrifying than the serial killer. And he was plenty next level already.

The story itself was riveting in the way that it was told from three separate viewpoints, and we don’t know exactly how they all connect up for nearly the entire story. (That they were separately voiced in the audio was marvelous.)

It is mostly Ellie’s story, but a piece of it is her daughter Amber’s. I got into the story through Ellie’s investigation, because the puzzle solving – and was it ever compelling – gives me enough comfort zone to deal with rest. The focus remains mostly on Ellie because her perspective, and her investigation, is the one that pushes the plot forward. And that just worked for me because I could get into her head. Which may be an uncomfortable place for her, but still held the most logic, motivation, and coherence.

While we know who Amber is, from her point of view we also learn that she’s been investigating on her own AND keeping her own secrets about it. She turns out to be a prime mover and shaker in what’s happening as the case unravels, but it’s a perspective she’s kept to herself. (Amber reads like she KNOWS she’s auditioning for the part of ‘Final Girl’ in this horror show and that put me off a bit. Not that it happens, but that she knows it’s happening as she does it and doesn’t change course. Then again, she’s still a teenager.)

The third point of view is from one of Ellie’s fellow former orphans, someone who perhaps was so damaged by his experiences that there’s no way back. That he manages to be a huge red herring, a victim AND a perpetrator and even, possibly, a hero, was a twist that helped to keep this reader on the edge of her seat until the very end. And more than a bit shaky for quite some time after.

I prefer to sidle up to horror, and this spider of a novel absolutely does creep up to it from the edges on all sides. Not just the spiders themselves, both two-legged and eight-legged, but also the suppressed horrors of the past that occur in memory and offstage, and, sadly and even more horrifyingly, in real life. It’s an utterly compelling read – or listen – every single step of the way. No matter how many legs are crawling through the reader’s brain as they read it.

Neither horror nor thrillers, and this is certainly both, are exactly my jam. But this book is going to be on my ‘Best Books of 2025’ list all the same.