I received the ebook copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review from penguin group dutton and netgalley. I think overall this book is a perfect october creepy read. The prologue was stomach turning in its intensity but I pushed through and was rewarded by a satisfying (although at times unbelievable) read.

I'm one of those people who really enjoy bloody, gruesome, and dark books. Theme Music ticks all those boxes, and more! Some elements stretch belief to the breaking point, but I don't think that detracts too much from the book as a whole. Fair warning, the violence is graphic, and contains lots of gore, so if you aren't into that, I would just skip this one. For me, this was an excellent introduction to T. Marie Vandelly and the depravity of her mind.
3.5 stars

*I received a review copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.
Thank you to Dutton Books and Netgalley.*

Dixie's family is brutally murdered at the hands of her father, who slices his own throat while Dixie sits in her high chair, not even two years old. Needless to say, Dixie struggles to connect with her family - three brothers, mother and father, as she grows up in her aunt's home. The tragedy follows her throughout her school years - a mix of pity and bullying. As an adult, Dixie enjoys anonymity, selecting to divulge her gruesome past to a select few. 
Her family's house goes up for sale while Dixie and Garrett, her long time boyfriend are searching for a home of their own. Dixie cannot pass it up. Though it creates a much turmoil in their relationship, Dixie moves into the house while Garrett refuses. 
While moving in her family's furniture and belongings, Dixie stumbles upon the police report - including graphic photographs. Dixie comes obsessed. Her family haunts the house - blood oozes in the kitchen as their injuries continue to bleed. Dixie holds conversations with her brothers and mother, but especially her father who encourages her violent urges.  Strange noises, items being moved or lost, lack of sleep, emotional stress all create an unstable Dixie. Then people start disappearing. 
The author did a great job removing Dixie's sanity and credibility. Scenes created such confusion for me - I couldn't tell what Dixie was imagining or what was really happening. As a result, it was difficult for me to finish this book. The graphic descriptions of her decapitated family moving around in the house - body parts flapping. Dixie's struggle to decipher what was real, what she was imagining. These elements provided horror and confusion, creepy and suspense. 
Dixie's discovery of her family's lie had been whispered throughout the novel. Not a great shock - yet certainly added another layer of horror and confusion. Why was Dixie left alive? 
The final scene provided suspense as well as predictability. I felt the missing element was pretty obvious - the hints throughout the novel were easy to catch. 
Overall, I thought this was a great story. I did struggle through my confusion to finish.

When Dixie Wheeler finds her family home for sale, she has to see it. The last time she was there, she was a baby sitting in a high chair with her murdered family laying around her. For twenty-five years her aunt and uncle, who raised her, would tell her very little. Hoping to remember or unearth the past, Dixie feels she has to have this house. When she tells her live in boyfriend, Garrett, who knows of the murders, this is her old home, he refuses to live there. So Dixie moves in alone. Then all kinds of hell starts happening in the house and to her. With all the things happening around her, and the belief her other uncle maintained before his death that her father was innocent of committing the murders, Dixie questions if any of what she knows of the events surrounding the murders are what actually happened. The more she searches, the more lies Dixie finds she's been told. But, will searching get her killed, or will she unearth the truth after all these years and stay alive?

I don’t put down a book midway through very often, but I just couldn’t get through this one.  It was too unrealistic and really disgusting.

Thank you, Dutton, for our gifted review copy. 

Add this to your list if you're looking for a darker whodunnit! This one is very graphic regarding the violence so the faint of heart need not apply. It's a great mystery novel.

I found the synopsis quite interesting, but there was more graphic violence than I expected. Some parts seemed a bit far-fetched, and other parts had me a bit confused. The numerous characters were hard to follow at times, and there just felt like there was too much going on. It made me feel like I never really had a chance to know Dixie, or any of the other characters. On the plus sides, the author used vivid detailing.

Ok. Wow. 😳

First of all. Let me start off by saying this book is NOT for the faint of heart... if you have a weak stomach I suggest that you pack up your things and turn around now, because you aren’t getting through the first couple of pages. 

Those of you that want to continue on this journey of blood, guts, and body parts ... my friends, you will not be disappointed. There is plenty to go around, and it is done very, very well. 

Dixie “baby blue” Wheeler moves into the home where 25 years earlier her father butchered her entire family, slits his own throat and for whatever reason, leaves her unharmed. WHAT POSSIBLY COULD GO WRONG?! 

From the first page this story is bone chilling. This is legitimately “read with the lights on” type of stuff. On top of that, the writing was done so well that I was constantly trying to figure out the plot & that is one of my favorite things in a mystery. I was never 100% sure of what was going to happen, I like to keep guessing and play detective through out the story. That being said there was 1 tip off that I caught on to, BUT, I am not even mad about because the ending was so phenomenal... more on that later. 

Let’s talk characters. Magnificent!! Each and every single character in this story came to life for me. Imagery, scenery...  spectacular. This creepy house... well let’s just say I can still picture it. I’m writing this review DAYS later, and I’m STILL picturing the kitchen, the table, the chairs, the sack of potatoes. 

So, why is my rating 4.5 stars and not 5? The police procedural aspect in the story is just way too unbelievable for me. I know that A LOT in this story is unbelievable, BUT,  I just can’t with a few things. However, I didn’t go into this looking for a “police procedural read” so I didn’t let it effect the experience too much. 

ESPECIALLY because this book has one of the MOST climactic endings I have ever read! Sometimes I read a book and there is so much anticipation for such a short conflict/climax... but oh NO SIREE BOB! Not here.

Theme Music was a really fast paced psychological thriller...I might even go as far as to say it was a psychological horror novel. Fair warning it was very brutal and graphic and bloody, so if that's not up your alley...then I would not suggest picking this one up. However if you love Karin Slaughter novels, then this one might be for you.

Synopsis:

When Dixie was a year old, her father murdered her entire family and then committed suicide, leaving Dixie the sole survivor. Twenty-five years later the house the murders took place in, goes up for sale. Dixie desperate for a connection with her lost family decides to take up residence in the old house and in an attempt to make sense of her present situation, decides to try and unravel the truth about her past. But as the bodies start piling up around her Dixie starts to question her own sanity. What really happened that bloody night 25 years ago?

I've seen a few mixed reviews on this one...but I loved it. I'm not a fan of horror movies at all...but I love me some scary, spine tingling, spooky, creepy and yes even twisted novels and this one checked all the boxes. I'll definitely be in the lookout for this authors next work!

I want to start off by thanking the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book. This was a very well written book by a new author for me. The book had a very good storyline with a lot of twists and turns and a twist at the end. I enjoyed reading this and didn’t wanna put it down. I highly recommend this book to anyone. I look forward to reading more in the future!

Theme Music has a brilliantly chilling start that had me all geared up for an equally chilling tale. And it does deliver on that in a lot of ways. The setting and atmosphere don't lack on the creep factor scale. Even though the house has been updated and seems to be in a good neighborhood, the writing and tone of the story give it an almost gothic feel.
The author has quite the imagination, and it is shared with us in graphic detail. The problem with that is I too have quite the imagination and most times, I can imagine it worse than a book can describe it. So, I usually find that less is more when it comes to the gory details. The gore and graphic details run rampant in this one, and while I would agree that those details were probably necessary to give us a good visual of the scene, it becomes repetitive all too quickly between Dixie's imagination and crime scene photos. Speaking of, I'm still trying to figure out why the detective, who is now retired, would've still had any files or photos from the scene, or why anyone related to the family would be given access. Wouldn't those have been part of a case file on record?
Anyway, back to those repetitive details - am I the only one who started getting really worried about Dixie's gag reflex? Seriously, about halfway through, I was already tired of Dixie's need to throw up or actually going through with it. There are other reactions to fear and turmoil, and I wouldn't have minded seeing a few of those in place of the all too frequent vomiting - freeze, pass out, freak out, scream your bloody head off, just do something other than throw up.
Despite all that, we do get some solid suspense reading with Theme Music. Is Dixie crazy? Is she haunted? Was someone else involved? All of those questions are bound to go through a reader's mind at least once while reading this one, and the author does get tricky with some of the happenings. We also have the equivalent of a couple of decent red herrings to wonder about as things progress along with some pretty good twists, especially in the last quarter or so of the book. There is also a supernatural element, which I didn't mind and felt like it worked with the story.
In the end, this one had things I liked and other things that I didn't, landing me firmly in the middle. I do think it was way longer than it needed to be, and with a bit of trimming down on the repetitiveness, this could easily have been a more entertaining and even creepier thriller. As I mentioned earlier, the author does have a great imagination and based on many things in this debut novel, I will be interested to see what she does next.

Dixie Wheeler was known as Baby Blue for the song playing when she was discovered at the crime scene where her father murdered their family and killed himself. She seeks understanding and closure in purchasing her family’s house and recreating her childhood home. Things happen that make her question her sanity and her own propensity for violence, and eventually her father’s guilt. Vandelly did a superb job evoking sympathy for Dixie through graphic descriptions of the family’s murder, her memories, and the weird occurrences in her family home. But she includes a supernatural element that wasn’t explored well enough to invoke speculation from Dear Reader. I was fortunate to receive a digital copy of this marvelously macabre story from the publisher Dutton Books through NetGalley.

Dixie Wheeler is moving back to her childhood home.  It’s now 25 years after her father brutally murdered the rest of her family.  Wanting to find a connection to a family she doesn’t remember she begins to unravel the past.  This is a dark psychological thriller.  It’s the kind of book you don’t want to read when you are home alone at night.  It’s hard to believe this is a debut.  It was well written and I loved every minute of it.

"It’s time to choose my own theme music, a song that can define my life, and what I have gone through, and the woman I have become."⁣
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Dixie Wheeler's mother and siblings were said to have been killed by her father in their home before he took a knife to his own throat. She was only eighteen months old and the sole survivor. Now she is looking to buy a home and has discovered that her family home is for sale. She thinks that moving into it would help her connect with the family she never knew. This leads to her looking into the tragedy and trying to figure out the whole truth.⁣
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This book grabbed me from the very start. Jaw dropped. Pages turning. Twisting and turning. This book was very good.⁣

Vandelly has hit it out of the park with this mind-blowing debut. The sole survivor of a family massacre moves back into her family home on the twenty-fifth anniversary of that horrific day. Soon, sleep deprivation and unnerving mishaps begin to nibble at the edges of Dixie's sanity. Deception and half-truths erode her relationships, causing her to question everything she thought to be true about herself, as well as those around her. I'd she haunted by the living or the dead? Is she the monster or victim? Taunt with anticipation, the author expertly leads the reader through hairpin twists and turns to a shocking end!😱

I started to read this book but wasn't interested in moving forward with reading it. It didn't draw me in right away.

I first want to thank NetGally and Dutton Books for giving me a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review!

I want to start off by saying how astonished that this is @t.marievandelly first novel 😱 This book has easily become one of my favorite books EVER. Her writing was captivating and memorable. I finished this book over a week ago and it is all I think about even after reading a whole other book after it. I already want to reread it; it’s THAT GOOD.

I’m not going to lie, I really don’t know how to put my thoughts of this book into a review without saying how much I loved it a million times. It is dark, dark, DARK. Which is right up my ally. There is so much cynical sarcasm through out the book that not only had me scared but had me laughing so hard. Yes, this book is very gory so ⚠️ warning for those that don’t like gore or extremely graphic books. Me, on the other hand, LOVED the darkness and gore in this book. It was so beautifully written; I can only hope I’m become half the writer @t.marievandelly is. It captured my attention write from the prologue - I actually took a picture of the first page and posted it to my insta story saying this was the best intro to any book I’ve ever read. There is NO fluff; everything written in this book has a meaning. If you are a thriller or horror fan, do yourself a favor and READ THIS BOOK. I cannot stress enough how much I loved this book, if you haven’t already got that impression early on in this review.

I’ve read a fare share of books, but this one has completely stolen my heart. Maybe it’s just my dark sense of humor but this author wrote something that I didn’t even realize I needed to read in my life.

Rate: Can I give all the stars??? No? Okay then I’m going with the maximum of 5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (totally deserves more)

My review can be found on my book instagram under the handle @bookswithsummer

This is a exceptionally well written suspense story. The book starts off with a very tragic gory beginning and the story just progresses into a very interesting ending. I do not recommend reading this book at night, or if you are at home alone. While reading this book every noise in my house is freaking me out, I had to keep the lights on, but I could not put it down.

Theme Music fit right in with my theme of books I wanted to read for October. It is a psychological thriller filled with horror and some very descriptive gory scenes. It has the twists and turns that I love because it keeps you guessing until the end.

Some scary sh💀t⁣⁣⁣
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Thank you @duttonbooks for the review copy.⁣⁣
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How do you rate a book that was really good but also scared the 💩 out of you?! Wow, Theme Music was intense! I had been saving it for a Halloween read and it brought all the haunted house of horrors vibes I could ever need. In fact, I think my spooky cup is full and now I’m only reading about ponies and flowers and cute babies until the end of the month.⁣⁣⁣
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Dixie Wheeler moves back into the home where her entire family was slaughtered by her father on Thanksgiving day. Hoping to find a connection to the family she lost she recreates the macabre decor from her family’s salvaged furniture. Things begin happening in the house because duh, it’s haunted as sh*t. Dix questions her sanity and wonders if the evil forces tormenting her are her father or a demon of her own making.⁣⁣⁣
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I couldn’t stop turning the pages on this one but I will warn you the pages are full of some very graphic imagery. If you can’t stand a little blood and guts this is not the book for you. I will say that the way it is written is haunting and beautiful while also being nightmare inducing. For someone who still refuses to go into a haunted house because honestly why would I pay someone to get scared I really enjoyed this book and gave it 5 ⭐️s. Now I’ll be sleeping with the lights on until the end of time.⁣⁣⁣
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