Imagine if Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy was implicated in a murder scandal involving a disgruntled 'quasher' ex-employee with an overly critical Twitter account alongside a bit of a lost and newly pregnant 'quester' employee whose naivety is easily manipulated. That is the basis of Snake Oil and it executes it all with a sinister aplomb.

We're treated with three female perspectives: Rhoda, the CEO and founder of the wellness company Radical; Cecilia, a Radical employee living with chronic pain who most definitely does not believe in the product she is pushing with an anonymous Twitter account called @radicalidiocy which eventually leads to her firing; and Dani, another Radical employee who wholeheartedly believes in being a Radigal and is taking a part in one of their trials for a new product without informing anyone that she is newly pregnant. Every character is morally grey, every character is truly unlikable yet compelling, and every character has a secret that eventually comes to light.

While it starts off a bit slow, the writing has this sort of menacing tone that slowly took over my brain as the plot unfolded and kept me hooked. I haven't read a thriller in a while that's managed to grip me so expertly, especially when considering the fact that I really didn't like any of the characters at all, but I could understand them and their motivations and that made all of the difference. The pace was consistent, the plot was engaging, and the writing had some really hard-hitting lines that I found myself really enjoying and wanting to highlight and underline in vain since I read off of a library copy.

Now the reason why this wasn't perfect was because I pretty much saw all of the twists  coming - when the initial death happened, the red herring that was placed was not something I believed for an instant, and the tiny clues that cropped up which led to the reveal of the actual villain and killer were obvious even if they never really piqued my interest at first. And the choice of villain was not very inspired at the end of the day, and felt a bit cheap in the sense that it felt like a cop-out to not only implicate the villain in terms of their sex but also off them with no true consequences for the murderer. There really is the whole "getting away with murder" trope right at the end, like literally, but I will say it was juxtaposed with the birth of Dani's child quite nicely to close the story off.

And while I didn't love how this ended, I still really enjoyed my time with this read a lot more than I anticipated, and in a manner that I wasn't quite expecting. Not sure who I'd recommend it to, but if a less than lacklustre ending doesn't deter you from a story, this literary thriller may work really well for you. I'll definitely be looking for more from Kelsey Rae Dimberg in the future.