The people who call the End of the Line helpline are at their lowest: frightened, desperate, and looking for a reason to keep going. Most of the volunteers who answer want to talk them back from the edge. Laura does not. Laura, unhappily married and quietly furious at how her own life has turned out, craves these calls — because what she wants is to guide the vulnerable toward ending their lives, and to be there, listening, when they do.
Her carefully hidden compulsion begins to unravel when Ryan's pregnant wife dies by suicide alongside a stranger she seems to have met only to die with. Shattered and searching for answers, Ryan starts to pull at the threads of what happened, and the trail leads him toward Laura. What follows is a tightening game of cat and mouse between a man who has lost everything and a woman who will go to terrifying lengths to protect her secret.
John Marrs's The Good Samaritan is a bleak, propulsive psychological thriller that turns a source of comfort into something predatory. Unflinching in its subject matter, it drives toward a confrontation in which each side proves willing to inflict devastating harm.
