By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: Since this is the final book in a trilogy, I recommend that you read my reviews on the previous volumes, Gutted and Dissolved and be forewarned that this review will contain MAJOR SPOILERS!!! for the entire series. Please, read at your own discretion.
In The Gutted, Dissolved, and Then Finished Trilogy, Anna Madorsky introduced us to killer couple Elliot and Jason. In the first book. Gutted, Jason meets an insomniac Elliot in a late night cafe where they share dark Nihilistic thoughts and complete isolation. They become lovers and eventually husband and wife. Jason reveals the worst aspects of his character and admits that he has killed someone before and has urges to do so again. Elliot alternates between appalled and fascinated and helps him kill again by the end of the book.
In the second volume, Dissolved, Elliot and Jason are now divorced. To separate herself from the violence and Jason's dark urges, Elliot moves to Portland, makes many new friends, reunites with family members, and falls in love with Max, another man. She makes plans to live a better, more positive life. But she can't get Jason out of her mind and when he returns, she can't help but submit to his desires.
Now we have Volume 3: Then Finished, the final volume, the end, the resolution to Jason and Elliot’s troubled relationship and murderous plans. This volume takes the dark hints from the previous books and gives them their inevitable, destructive, graphic, and bloody conclusion.
It lives up to its name by ending the series not with a period but an exclamation point! Book 3 revels in the darkness that is central to the narration whereas before it was hovering on the edge in Book 1 and moving ever closer in Book 2.
Now Elliot is romantically involved with Max who was introduced in Dissolved. He has finally defrosted her previously icy nature and she is beginning to open herself up to having another long term relationship. However, Jason is still there and still a part of her life. The two ex spouses rekindle their romance and with this romance comes dead bodies. It isn't too long before the duo are ready to kill again but now the relationship has shifted in surprising ways.
Gutted involved Jason introducing Elliot to her darker nature and murderous impulses. Dissolved showed her trying to get away from them. Then Finished counters the previous books by saying that no matter how far Elliot tries to run and escape, she can't hide who she is. The creature existed within her but needed Jason to bring it forward.
In the previous books, Elliot fights against her darker nature. In this book, she accepts and embraces that darker nature. The conflict in Dissolved involved her finding better friends that bring out a better lighter nature within her. Here, Max does not represent a brighter path for her but a barrier towards what she now sees as her true self.
She sees the encouraging kindness that she once depended on with Max as restrictive, confining, and weak willed. She questions his motives and shoves her affair with Jason into his face, probably to close that final link to a lawful steady society. She made her choice so in rejecting Max, she rejects society.
A strange thing occurs throughout the book. It's clear that Elliot learned from Jason to embrace a darker and violent nature but she learned it too well. She used to be on the sidelines, making suggestions, driving the get away car, providing the alibi, and sometimes assisting in the graphic details. But here she is a stronger forceful presence and takes the lead.
Many of Elliot and Jason’s arguments consist of Elliot pushing her ex into doing something and he resists, which is the complete inversion of their former relationship. She has become more aggressive, darker tempered, and more open to causing great harm.
It's also highly significant that this is the only book in the trilogy where Elliot commits murder on her own. She has been open to the possibility of taking blood and now she can master and own it. She surpassed Jason in rage and violence and now he has to live with the monster that he created.
It's also significant that as Elliot strengthens, Jason weakens. He is now the withdrawn quiet one suggesting from the sides. He stews in a rage that is burning down into weariness and lethargy. The rage that fueled him has been given to Elliot with none left for him. Without it, he has nothing to live for.
Elliot has seen a better life but blatantly rejects it. Jason has no other frame of reference so cannot function when the chain of command is ruptured. His pain that he blamed as being the catalyst for murder is now all-consuming when he doesn't have an outlet to satiate it. He used to be angry, now he's just sad.
As with all murderers, Elliot and Jason’s crime spree comes to an end. It is an inevitable conclusion to a toxic relationship that was foretold the moment that an intense mysterious stranger saw an insomniac woman in a cafe and enveloped her into his private darkness.
