The Good Samaritan

The Good Samaritan by John Marrs is a standalone Psychological Thriller published in 2017, and an ITW Thriller Award finalist. At its centre sits Laura, a volunteer for a suicide crisis helpline called End of the Line. On paper, she's exactly what vulnerable people need: a calm voice, a patient ear, someone who listens. In reality, she's something far darker. Laura doesn't want her callers to find reasons to stay. She wants to push them over the edge - and she's disturbingly good at it.

Laura herself is no simple monster. She's a woman who has survived serious illness and a bruising marriage, arriving at her forties with a simmering, directionless anger she can't discharge anywhere else. The helpline fills that void. Marrs builds her with uncomfortable precision, charting exactly how she selects her victims, works their fears, and bends their perception of reality until their resolve crumbles. This is Psychological Manipulation rendered in forensic detail - unsettling precisely because the mechanics feel plausible. A Morally Grey Characters study of the first order, Laura is the kind of antagonist you can't look away from, even when you desperately want to.

Then there's Ryan. His pregnant wife has died beside a stranger, and Ryan can't accept the official account. The grief is real, but it hardens quickly into something more purposeful: a need to understand who that stranger was and why his wife chose to spend her final moments with them. What begins as a search for answers becomes a Cat-and-Mouse Chase that tightens with every chapter. The novel alternates between Laura's and Ryan's perspectives - a Multiple POV structure that keeps both threads alive and in constant, anxious tension. Seeing events from both sides of the hunt is what gives the pacing its particular charge: you know far more than either character does, and that dramatic irony is its own kind of dread.

Marrs handles the subject matter - suicide, grief, and the exploitation of emotional vulnerability - without flinching or sensationalising. The Emotional Trauma threaded through both protagonists' storylines is treated seriously, and the book's exploration of Psychological Horror emerges not from the supernatural but from the recognition that a person with the right words and the wrong intentions can do genuine, irreversible damage. Ryan's arc carries its own complications, too; his grief warps into something that makes him harder to root for in straightforward terms, which only adds to the moral unease running through the whole novel.

Readers drawn to thrillers with a genuinely unsettling antagonist, an Unreliable Narrator quality baked into the dual-POV format, and a plot that resists easy resolution will find this one of Marrs's most focused and disturbing works. It's short on comfort but long on tension, and the question of whether Ryan will find the truth before Laura finds him drives every page.