Book Review - Too Old For This by Samantha Downing

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Title: Too Old For This

Author: Samantha Downing

Format reviewed: Ebook

Source: Netgalley

Publisher: Penguin

Publication Date: 28th August 2025

Rating: 4 Stars

You’d never guess Lottie Jones had skeletons in her closet.

She’s lived in town for decades now. She’s getting older. She lives for the simple pleasures of weekly bingo games at church, and gossiping with her friends about their children’s love lives.

But when investigative journalist Plum Dixon shows up on her doorstep asking questions about Lottie’s past, and specifically about her connection to numerous unsolved murders, well, Lottie just can’t have that.

But getting away with murder is hard enough when you’re young. And when Lottie receives another annoying knock on the door, she realises this crime might just be the death of her…

Warning: There are certain scenes in this book that you definitely shouldn't read while eating.  Something I really wish I had known before I started this in a restaurant to be greeted incredibly early on with a body being frozen, cut up into small bits parcelled in the freezer and labelled as assorted meats... only to then be burnt a few at a time on a fire, all described in a lot more detail than this - and in the first chapter or two so not a spoiler! 

I'm honestly surprised I managed to eat my dinner having just read that. 

Thankfully for the majority of the book, there wasn't anything else that made me fill a bit ill, and in fact I was at all times rather impressed with Lottie's cunning. 

She is attempting to stay one step ahead of many different people, while the past is trying to come back to haunt her.  

Make no mistake this is not some innocent doddery old woman, this is one incredibly smart woman, who just has a rather deadly hobby,  I loved Lottie a lot. 

And I really enjoyed the writing in this book, it's as I may have mentioned very descriptive and I was keen to see how an increasingly complex situation would potentially resolve itself. 

Discovering the reasoning behind Lottie's past decisions was interesting, and she never lied to us the readers as to what she may have done.  Just kept things hidden from literally everyone else.  There is even a good old fashioned nemesis in this book! 

I think this is certainly the sort of book that will make you have a second or third look at your own grandparents, or those older than them, and wonder just what they may really be capable of.  You definitely learn not to underestimate an older woman this this.  Lottie is formidable! 

Thank you to Penguin and Netgalley for this copy which I have reviewed honestly and voluntarily.