Too Old for This

Samantha Downing pens deliciously mind-bending thrillers like her debut, My Lovely Wife, and He Started It. She followed those scintillating and perverse tales with For Your Own Good and A Twisted Love Story. With each successive release, Downing has demonstrated that she is a master at crafting tales replete with fully developed, fascinatingly diabolical characters, unimaginable plot turns, and shocking revelations. And left readers anxiously pondering what she will come up with next. Finally, the wait is over. And Too Old for This was well worth it. Downing wisely chose to tell the story of Lottie Jones – not her real name — through her first-person narrative. She is living a quiet, but full life that she finds satisfying. An anonymous life. And that’s just the way she wants it. At seventy-five years of age, she is content attending First Covenant Church regularly and socializing with her small tribe of gossipy, judgmental friends from whom she anticipates criticism of the dishes she brings to potlucks or bingo games. (“Homemade is preferred. Anything store-bought is frowned upon.”) The book is worth reading solely to savor their interactions. Not only are the supporting characters Downing has created thoroughly believable, their banter is often hilarious, providing context to the tale Lottie weaves and insight into her psyche. Lottie is very set in her ways and quite cantankerous. Her friends often try her patience. Downing recalls her own grandmother’s devotion to bingo and wanted her characters to “feel like real people and not be infantilized. . . . They are adults with seven decades of life behind them, so they are a little funny, self-deprecating, and they want a drink at bingo, . . . but that’s not allowed in church. . . . They realize they are being talked down to.” And they don’t appreciate it, but they return week after week. As the book opens, Dottie’s life is upended by Plum Dixon, who has located her through “public records.” Plum is producing a documentary series about Lottie and the crimes she was accused of committing years ago – before the internet. Lottie was tried and convicted as a serial killer in the media and by the public, but she was never criminally convicted, nor did she serve time in prison. She had a particularly good lawyer. She was able to adopt a new identity, move from Washington to Oregon with her son, Archie (now a forty-six-year-old divorced father of two practicing law in California and on the verge of marrying his pregnant girlfriend who is half his age), and start over. But now Plum, with her inquisitiveness and eagerness to interview Lottie, threatens to disrupt the peaceful existence Lottie has long enjoyed. Worse, she insists that she will produce the series with or without Lottie’s cooperation because she is intent on exonerating Lottie “once and for all.” Lottie simply will not have her history splashed all over the internet. The thought of it infuriates and terrifies her. So she is forced out of her decade-long retirement. Lottie grew tired of killing, and “all the work involved. The cleanup, the body, the lull, the anxiety about when or if someone would show up at my door . . .” When she was younger, she only killed when three things were true. As with sex, she had to be in the mood. And there had to be an opportunity. “But the most important thing was the anger. I had to be very, very angry.” Downing was inspired to write Too Told for This when she experienced health challenges that limited her mobility and she was forced to adapt to her changed circumstances. She created Lottie and “channeled all of that into her. She needs to change and adapt to so many things now. Not only her age and her condition, but also technology. The world has changed; science has changed. . . .I channeled all those frustrations into her and made them her frustrations instead.” Lottie has to take all of that into consideration as she devises ways to conceal her latest crimes. A few years ago, she took a free class at the library about modern technology, so she assumes that “every device is being tracked.” And people like Plum have a lot of devices that Lottie needs to account for. Plum also has people who become concerned if she doesn’t check in with them, respond to messages, or post on social media. And they come looking for her. Lottie’s greatest fear is “being caught and exposed, and her family and friends finding out about her past,” according to Downing. But she doesn’t see any other available option if she wants to preserve the life she has cultivated for herself and retain her freedom. She is aggravated at having to consider the numerous technological, forensic, and scientific advances since her last killing. She’s highly intelligent and very clever, but covering up a crime often requires committing yet another crime . . . Yet as tiring as it all is, Lottie’s spirit is buoyed by how skilled she is at what she does. Killing “makes me feel invincible.” “The key to writing a protagonist like this is to be in their mind, in their worldview,” Downing says. She has made Lottie extremely and credibly self-aware. She takes readers into Lottie’s “mind the whole time” because there is no other narrator, so no other perspective is presented. Lottie reveals her justifications for her behavior and, to her, her reasons are perfectly rational and logical. She details the various ways over the years in which she was mistreated, judged (“The only thing worse than being judged is being dismissed”), and why her responses were appropriate. She never second-guesses herself or wavers in her viewpoint. She compartmentalizes expertly. Killing is separate and apart from her ordinary, everyday life as a mother, grandmother, and good friend. And, ironically, it is those roles for which she wants to be remembered fondly. Crafting a story like Too Old for This requires extraordinary storytelling talent. Downing deftly balances the horrific acts in which Lottie engages (and parts of the book are gruesomely graphic) with very dark humor which never goes so far that it becomes off-putting or transforms Lottie into a mere caricature of a serial killer. She also keeps the pace of the tale moving briskly with no lulls as Lottie scrambles to evade detection of either her past or her recent crimes. And she injects shocking twists and revelations at expertly timed intervals that make it nearly impossible to stop reading. Perhaps most surprisingly, Downing manages to make Lottie sympathetic and relatable. Readers, especially those enjoying retirement, will identify with Lottie’s reluctance to disrupt the routines she is accustomed to and return to her time-consuming, exhausting avocation, no matter how satisfying she found it years ago and does again. Downing also describes Lottie’s search for a retirement community to move to because she is all-too aware that she is physically slowing down, tires easily, and definitely does not want to be dependent on anyone else, especially Archie. (It’s much harder for her to move dead bodies now and she has to devise new methods to get that done. And her memory isn’t as good as it used to be so she worries that she will forget about or overlook evidence that could lead to her capture.) She is concerned about whether she can afford to live in her preferred senior living facility, an issue many senior Americans grapple with. Older female readers will relate to Lottie’s fury about not being seen. Downing says she did not realize when she began writing the book that Lottie, “like so many elderly women, had become invisible.” Who would suspect that an unobtrusive elderly lady playing bingo in the church social hall just savagely murdered a young woman and disposed of her body in a most callous and nightmare-inducing manner? Too Old for This is engrossing, frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and outrageously entertaining. Downing again demonstrates her unique ability to create twisty thrillers populated with pathologically twisted protagonists and supporting characters who bring dimension and depth to the story. Downing tells her creative story in an inventive, absorbing way. In any other author’s hands, Too Old for This could have been just a ho-hum mystery or campy crime fiction. But Downing’s skillful construction of Lottie’s narrative and restraint make it one of 2025’s best thrillers. Thanks to NetGalley for an Advance Reader's Copy of the book in conjunction with the BookBrowse First Impressions program.