Category Archives: Mystery/Suspense/Thriller

Review: The Night in Question by Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson

Book Review and Content, Contemporary, Mystery/Suspense/Thriller, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , , ,
The Night in Question by Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson cover shows half the face of a blond girl looking through binoculars in the left foreground. The silhouettes of a building with a balcony and a girl mid-fall are in the background.

The Night in Question (The Agathas #2)
Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson
Delacorte Press
Published May 30, 2023

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About The Night in Question

How do you solve a murder? Follow the lessons of the master—Agatha Christie! Iris and Alice find themselves in the middle of another Castle Cove mystery in the sequel to New York Times bestseller The Agathas by powerhouse authors Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson.

Alice Ogilvie and Iris Adams became the talk of Castle Cove when they cracked the biggest case of the fall: the death of Brooke Donovan. Together, the Agathas put Brooke’s killer away for good, and since then, things around town have been almost back to normal. Quiet, even.

But if Alice and Iris know anything, it’s that sometimes quiet is just the calm before the storm. The truth is, Brooke’s disappearance wasn’t the first mystery to rock Castle Cove, and it won’t be the last. So when their school dance at the infamous Levy Castle—the site of film starlet Mona Moody’s unsolved death back in the 1940s—is interrupted by a violent assault, Iris and Alice pull out their murder boards and get back to work.

To understand the present, sometimes you need to look into the past. And if the Agathas want a chance at solving their new case, that’s exactly where they’ll need to start digging. Only what they uncover might very well kill them.

My Review

The first book in The Agathas series introduced an unsolved Castle Cove mystery involving a film star named Mona Moody. I love that this second book explores more of what happened to her.

I enjoyed the number of female characters and the scenes connecting them with one another. It felt natural– I didn’t even notice until looking back at the end of the book. But there are a lot of female characters and a lot of scenes showing connections between them. Female characters are also very often the ones making the bold moves at the forefront of the story.

At the beginning of the story, I struggled a little bit with Alice’s negativity. She’s been estranged from her old friend group and feels pretty hostile toward them. She has some pretty unflattering thoughts about them, and after a while, it started to feel pretty mean. At one point, she finds an unconscious girl who’s been severely injured, and instead of caring that she could die without help, she rushes off after a potential suspect. I think the idea was that she’s kind of an impulsive person who can get laser-focused on one thing and sort of ignore everything else. And that makes some sense, but it felt kind of cold to me.

Iris’s empathy and vulnerability balanced out my feelings about Alice, though. And as the story progressed, Alice warmed and experienced some vulnerability of her own. I enjoyed the relationship between them quite a bit.

I’m not a super experienced mystery reader, but I thought the pacing of the mystery here was excellent. I’ve read books where the last few chapters wind up the story in a mad rush that leaves me feeling dizzy. None of that here. The elements came together in ways that raised the intensity without making me feel overwhelmed by the speed at which things unfolded. All in all, I thought it was very nicely done.

Would I continue this series? Absolutely. I really enjoyed this one and how it tied together past and present.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 12 up.

Representation
Major characters are white.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Mild profanity used pretty infrequently.

Romance/Sexual Content
The girls learn, in passing, that a peripheral friend (and high school graduate) works at a strip club to pay for college. At one point, Iris laments that she hasn’t kissed a boy yet.

Spiritual Content
None.

Violent Content
Situations of peril. References to domestic violence. The girls find the victim of a violent attack. Iris sees someone in the midst of trying to kill someone else. A person waves a flare gun, threatening to use it to kill someone. Someone hits a girl over the head with a blunt object, causing head trauma. A girl sustains injuries to her face that require stitches. Someone kicks a girl in the stomach repeatedly, breaking one of her ribs.

Drug Content
Alice notices teen boys passing a flask at a school dance. Adults drink alcohol at a social gathering.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support this blog. I received a free copy of THE NIGHT IN QUESTION in exchange for my honest review.

Review: All the Dead Lie Down by Kyrie McCauley

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All the Dead Lie Down
Kyrie McCauley
Katherine Tegen Books
Published May 16, 2023

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All the Dead Lie Down

The Haunting of Bly Manor meets House of Salt and Sorrows in award-winning author Kyrie McCauley’s contemporary YA gothic romance about a dark family lineage, the ghosts of grief, and the lines we’ll cross for love.

The Sleeping House was very much awake . . .

Days after a tragedy leaves Marin Blythe alone in the world, she receives a surprising invitation from Alice Lovelace—an acclaimed horror writer and childhood friend of Marin’s mother. Alice offers her a nanny position at Lovelace House, the family’s coastal Maine estate.

Marin accepts and soon finds herself minding Alice’s peculiar girls. Thea buries her dolls one by one, hosting a series of funerals, while Wren does everything in her power to drive Marin away. Then Alice’s eldest daughter returns home unexpectedly. Evie Hallowell is every bit as strange as her younger sisters, and yet Marin is quickly drawn in by Evie’s compelling behavior and ethereal grace.

But as Marin settles in, she can’t escape the anxiety that follows her like a shadow. Dead birds appear in Marin’s room. The children’s pranks escalate. Something dangerous lurks in the woods, leaving mutilated animals in its wake. All is not well at Lovelace House, and Marin must unravel its secrets before they consume her.

My Review

I completely fell in love with Kyrie McCauley’s writing in her book WE CAN BE HEROES, so when I saw she had a new book coming out, I didn’t even read what it was before requesting a copy for review. Ha.

The cover copy gave me some THE TURN OF THE SCREW vibes– a girl comes to an old estate to work as a nanny for two children who have some creepy habits. This isn’t a retelling of that play, though. The setup is similar, but the plot goes a whole lot of other places.

I liked the dark, endlessly creepy vibes. It definitely has that edge-of-your-seat, something-really-bad-is-about-to-happen kind of feeling all the way through the book.

The characters really hooked me into the story, too. It’s a very predominantly female cast. I think the only male named characters are the Lovelace girls’ father and a neighbor man who kind of looks out for danger in the woods. The younger sisters are mischievous and odd. It’s easy to tell they’re lonely and grieving, and that they’re keeping some kind of secret. I liked the push and pull feeling of the relationship between them and Marin, who feels drawn to them because of their sorrow and loneliness but wary because they can be capricious and cold.

As Marin tries to untangle the mystery around the Lovelace estate and the complicated history between her mother and Alice Lovelace, she also meets a girl her age, and a tenuous romance develops between them. I loved the sweetness of that love against the darkness of the rest of the story.

Conclusion

I feel like ALL THE DEAD LIE DOWN left me with a lot of questions. Not in the sense of the story seeming unfinished– I liked the end a lot. It just left me with a lot of questions about how to weigh out someone’s motives versus the outcomes of their choices.

Overall, I definitely recommend this book for readers looking for a romance with a really dark edge to it. I could see fans of WE WERE LIARS by E. Lockhart or IT LOOKS LIKE US by Alison Ames really liking this one.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 14 up.

Representation
Marin and a girl have a romantic relationship. Major characters are white. Marin has anxiety and panic attacks.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Strong profanity used somewhat infrequently.

Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing between two girls. References to more than that. They sleep in the same bed overnight.

Spiritual Content
Marin sees animals who are critically, even fatally, injured limping around. At first she isn’t sure whether they’re dying or if something else is happening to them. Several birds in this state end up in her room.

See spoiler section at the end for more.

Violent Content
Situations of peril. See spoiler section.

Drug Content
Marin and Evie drink alcohol together one night.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support this blog. I received a free copy of ALL THE DEAD LIE DOWN in exchange for my honest review.

Spoilers Below

Spiritual Content
Marin encounters creatures that are undead… they were dead but are somehow alive, even in their decayed state. Some descriptions of partially rotted or decrepit animals and people. She learns that someone has the ability to bring back the dead.

Violent Content
Sometimes the creatures who are reanimated come back “dark”, meaning they are bent on causing harm to people. Marin and her allies fight more than one undead creature intent on harming them.


Review: Last One to Fall by Gabriella Lepore

Book Review and Content, Contemporary, Mystery/Suspense/Thriller, Romance, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , , , , ,

Last One to Fall
Gabriella Lepore
Inkyard Press
Published May 9, 2023

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About Last One to Fall

Six friends. Five suspects. One murder.

Savana Caruso and Jesse Melo have known each other since they were kids, so when Jesse texts Savana in the middle of the night and asks her to meet him at Cray’s Warehouse, she doesn’t hesitate. But before Savana can find Jesse, she bears witness to a horrifying murder, standing helpless on the ground as a mysterious figure is pushed out of the fourth floor of the warehouse. 

Six teens were there that night, and five of them are now potential suspects. With the police circling, Savana knows what will happen if the wrong person is charged, particularly once she starts getting threatening anonymous text messages.

As she attempts to uncover the truth, Savana learns that everyone is keeping secrets—and someone is willing to do whatever it takes to keep those secrets from coming to light.

My Review

I liked a lot of things about this book. First, I liked that the murder doesn’t happen until later in the story. This creates a lot of time for the reader to get to know the person who’s killed, and to get to see the dynamics in the friend group in action. I can’t remember if I’ve read another murder mystery like that before. I can really only think of stories in which the person is murdered either before the story begins or very near to the beginning. So I thought that was a cool, different way to tell this particular story.

The friend group also had some interesting dynamics. I guess the downside of telling a friend group story like this is that it makes for a large cast to introduce all at the beginning. Once I grasped the relationships between the characters, though, I felt like I was able to follow things pretty quickly.

In terms of the mystery– I can honestly say I kept thinking I had it figured out, and I definitely didn’t. I liked that there were clues I could look back at and recognize after I knew what to look for. So that was nicely done, I thought.

I liked the romantic moments, too. It made sense why the characters kind of danced around each other for so long, and I think it also added to my anticipation of seeing them finally work things out between them.

On the whole, I think fans of Diana Urban or Karen McManus will find a fast-paced mystery with a splash of romance in LAST ONE TO FALL.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 14 up.

Representation
Jesse’s friend Freddie is Black. Jesse’s dad is an alcoholic.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Extreme profanity used somewhat frequently.

Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing between boy and girl. Brief sexual assault in one scene when a boy forces himself on a girl, kissing her against her will.

Spiritual Content
None.

Violent Content
A girl witnesses a person’s fatal fall from a fourth story window. Boys get into a fist fight. In one scene, two boys attack another boy, beating him up. A boy and girl fight, and his behavior certainly has some red flags for abuse. He’s controlling, jealous, and grabs her arm at one point.

Drug Content
School officials find steroids in the locker of one of Jesse’s friends and expel him. Teens drink alcohol at a party.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support this blog. I received a free copy of LAST ONE TO FALL in exchange for my honest review.

Review: Warrior Girl, Unearthed by Angeline Boulley

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Warrior Girl, Unearthed
Angeline Boulley
Henry Holt & Co.
Published May 2, 2023

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads

About Warrior Girl, Unearthed

From the New York Times bestselling author of Firekeeper’s Daughter comes a thrilling YA mystery about a Native teen who must find a way to bring an ancestor home to her tribe.

Perry Firekeeper-Birch was ready for her Summer of Slack but instead, after a fender bender that was entirely not her fault, she’s stuck working to pay back her Auntie Daunis for repairs to the Jeep.

Thankfully she has the other outcasts of the summer program, Team Misfit Toys, and even her twin sister Pauline. Together they ace obstacle courses, plan vigils for missing women in the community, and make sure summer doesn’t feel so lost after all.

But when she attends a meeting at a local university, Perry learns about the “Warrior Girl”, an ancestor whose bones and knife are stored in the museum archives, and everything changes. Perry has to return Warrior Girl to her tribe. Determined to help, she learns all she can about NAGPRA, the federal law that allows tribes to request the return of ancestral remains and sacred items. The university has been using legal loopholes to hold onto Warrior Girl and twelve other Anishinaabe ancestors’ remains, and Perry and the Misfits won’t let it go on any longer.

Using all of their skills and resources, the Misfits realize a heist is the only way to bring back the stolen artifacts and remains for good. But there is more to this repatriation than meets the eye as more women disappear and Pauline’s perfectionism takes a turn for the worse. As secrets and mysteries unfurl, Perry and the Misfits must fight to find a way to make things right – for the ancestors and for their community.

My Review

I’ll admit I didn’t really know much about this book when I asked to review it. Mostly, I knew the author’s name, because her debut, FIREKEEPER’S DAUGHTER was all anyone was talking about for a while when it came out in 2021. So I wanted to read it on the strength of that praise.

And… all I can say is that no one who was blown away by Angeline Boulley’s writing exaggerated. I mean, wow.

The story has a lot of moving parts. Perry and her sister are doing this summer internship (Perry only under duress). Girls keep going missing from their community. Perry begins learning about laws and processes governing the way that ancestral remains are identified and (ideally) returned to tribes and decides she must help return the remains of a woman knows as Warrior Girl. There’s the possibility of romance for Perry with one of the other interns.

So there’s a lot going on. The beginning builds a little bit slowly. I remember not being sure what the story was going to really be about. It took some time for me to feel like I got oriented within the story.

Once I did, though, the story took off. Roadblocks, and setbacks, and raised stakes, and twists kept coming one after another. And every single one seemed to pull the story more into focus.

All those pieces came together to show a more complete picture, and all of it illustrated a powerful theme about the value of life and the need to honor community and ancestry.

Conclusion

I loved this book. I’ve already got a copy of FIREKEEPER’S DAUGHTER, and I am really excited to read it. Some of the minor characters in this book are in FIREKEEPER’S DAUGHTER, so I’m curious what blanks reading that one will fill in. I hope there are more stories about Sugar Island and Perry’s family in the works, because I will definitely read them.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 14 up.

Representation
Perry and most other characters are Ojibwe citizens. Perry’s grandmother was Black.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Extreme profanity used pretty infrequently.

Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing between boy and girl. Perry wonders who her sister and her aunt are having sex with. A person Perry is close to reveals that she was raped by a man Perry knows by name.

Spiritual Content
References to Ojibwe tribal ceremonies, histories, and traditions.

Violent Content
Situations of peril. Girls in the community have been going missing. One girl’s body is found. Someone discovers a murdered man’s body. Another girl appears to have died from a fatal injury. A boy and a man both suffer head injuries. A girl describes how she was tied up and escaped.

Drug Content
Perry’s twin sister eats gummies with marijuana in them to manage her anxiety. References to adults drinking alcohol.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support this blog. I received a free copy of WARRIOR GIRL, UNEARTHED in exchange for my honest review.

Review: Betrayal by the Book by Michael D. Beil

Book Review and Content, Middle Grade 8-12, Mystery/Suspense/Thriller, , , , , , , ,

Betrayal by the Book (The Swallowtail Legacy #2)
Michael D. Beil
Pixel+Ink
Published April 18, 2023

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About Betrayal by the Book

A writer’s conference brings twelve-year-old Lark’s favorite writer–and a suspicious death–to Swallowtail Island, in the second book in this middle grade mystery series by an Edgar Award-nominated author.

Swallowtail Island is hosting the Swallowtales Writer’s Conference. Lark’s ecstatic to be chosen as a “page” for her favorite author, Ann E. Keyhart.

But they say you should never meet your idols. When Keyhart arrives with her personal assistant in tow, she is nothing but a terror. And within a few hours, the assistant is dead! But the explanation isn’t sitting well. Not when lots of people had reasons to want to be rid of Keyhart, and especially not after it’s revealed the assistant recently completed a hot new novel and the file’s vanished from her computer.

Then Lark finds out the assistant had a bird–the match to the one she found hidden in her mom’s book–and she needs answers. It looks like Swallowtail Island still has secrets to reveal, and Lark’s going to uncover them.

A gripping new chapter in the Swallowtail Legacy series, Mike D. Beil spins another clever clue hunt that seamlessly slips in alongside the best classics of middle grade mystery.

My Review

I read the first book in this series, WRECK AT ATA’S REEF last year, and really enjoyed it. So, I was excited to see that this second book was coming out this year. Like the first, it’s set on a small island, and features some of Lark’s many family members.

I really liked that the story takes place during a writer’s conference at which Lark is a volunteer helper to her favorite author. Though the conference itself stays more in the background, it still managed to hit a lot of key moments from a conference: panels, hurt feelings over harsh feedback, encouraging words from a beloved author, and disorganized statements from someone clearly underprepared.

I had very strong suspicions about who was responsible for the assistant’s death even before I read the first page of the story, and I was right. So, that made it a little difficult for me to enjoy Lark’s journey unraveling the clues.

I also expected the bird figurine to tie into the mystery somehow? It remained pretty separate, though. Because that thread began in the first book, I kind of wonder if it’s something that will be the center of a mystery in the next book in the series? I haven’t heard anything, so I don’t know.

All in all, I think I’d have enjoyed this one a bit more if I hadn’t figured out the mystery so quickly. I still enjoyed the island community and Lark’s role as a conference volunteer. I’m not sorry I read the book. The series still makes me think of the Northwoods Mysteries by Margi Preus.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 8 to 12.

Representation
Major characters are white.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
None.

Romance/Sexual Content
Lark wonders whether she’s attracted to a boy on the island.

Spiritual Content
None.

Violent Content
Lark responds to a scream and sees the dead body of a woman who has apparently died of an allergic reaction. (No blood, just open blank eyes, clearly not breathing, cold to the touch.)

Drug Content
Ann Keyheart gets drunk in several scenes and slurs her words or behaves rudely.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support this blog. I received a free copy of BETRAYAL BY THE BOOK in exchange for my honest review.

Middle Grade Mondays!

Greg at Always in the Middle does a Monday roundup of posts about middle grade books and news. Check out today’s Marvelous Middle Grade Mondays!

Review: Hunt for Eden’s Star by D. J. Williams

Book Review and Content, Mystery/Suspense/Thriller, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , , , , , ,

Hunt for Eden’s Star
D. J. Williams
Tyndale House
Published April 4, 2023

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The Hunt for Eden’s Star

A coming-of-age teen is thrown into a world of ancient secrets when he discovers a supernatural compass that protects a weapon of mass destruction. With the help of a diverse group of friends, he embarks on a global adventure, seeking the truth about his sister’s death. He uncovers two clandestine, supernatural societies waging an epic, hidden war that threatens the future of civilization.

D. J. Williams’s suspenseful, page-turning style whisks readers into a wildly exciting, supernatural adventure that grabs hold of the imagination and never lets go. As Jack races to collect ancient artifacts critical to the survival of the world, readers are transported to incredible locales across Asia, including the lush jungles of the Philippines and the high-energy streets of Hong Kong. Themes of addiction, revenge, faith, and friendship emerge as Jack battles literal and psychological demons, and even his own friends and family members, on his quest to thwart the forces of evil.

My Review

This was a tough one for me. Suspense is always a bit of an iffy genre, so it could be that I’m generally less comfortable reading that type of story. I found myself struggling not only with some of the suspense elements, but also other elements of the story as well.

One of the things I wrestled with most was the portrayal of characters. I felt like a lot of the characters came across as kind of flat. Jack and his friends kind of acted a bit like frat boys, only interested in girls when they were attractive or could offer the boys a benefit of some kind (a key to an exclusive area, for example). Do high school boys act like that? Yeah, I’ve known some who did. But I found it to be an odd choice to cast those boys as the heroes of the story?

I also felt like Jack never really gained real forward momentum. There were a few scenes where he would make a grand statement about having a goal (one time this was about getting revenge for his sister’s death), and in the next scene, another character would basically tell him that was the wrong goal because reasons. And Jack would abandon his stated goal and kind of be back to trying to figure out his next move. I think I expected him to at some point become the character making things happen.

He does have moments where he accomplishes this. For example, he rescues a bunch of girls who are prisoners being trafficked by the bad guys. It’s a cool scene, but it didn’t really connect to the larger story other than to remind us that the bad guys are super bad.

Conclusion

HUNT FOR EDEN’S STAR has a lot of interesting elements in it. For example, Jack and his friends attend a coed, elite boarding school with four houses. Each house is identified with a particular set of virtues. Students are assigned to a house by a sort of magical process. Very reminiscent of a certain wizarding school. It was cool, and maybe the various houses are more involved in later books in the series, but I didn’t really catch much connection to the story in this first book.

Lots of the story takes place in Hong Kong, so I enjoyed the connection to history and politics/current events happening there. I kind of wish the story had featured that more in connection to the plot.

So, there were some really cool elements. I don’t know if the author just wanted to include all the things that will be relevant to later books to kind of garner reader interest for those things and set up some elements for later? It made the book kind of a long one for YA, especially for YA suspense, at almost 500 pages.

On the whole, I think this series really isn’t for me. Parts of it reminded me of the TIME ECHOES series by Bryan Davis which also has kind of a secret society, murder mystery thing going on. If you liked that one, then HUNT FOR EDEN’S STAR might be a good fit, too.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 12 up.

Representation
Jack is white. Some minor characters are BIPOC.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
None.

Romance/Sexual Content
Some comments by boys about girls being attractive. A man brings a girl who is bound and blindfolded to Jack’s room and hints that Jack is to have sex with the girl.

Spiritual Content
Some characters worship Elyon. It seems like this might be supposed to be a representation of Christianity. (The book is published by a Christian publisher.) The religion is pretty transactional. Characters earn supernatural gifts by fully committing to the faith. Jack must pass tests where he must master his fear and instead have faith. If a servant of Elyon goes to a forbidden place, they lose their supernatural abilities and eventually die. Jack’s sister made a kind of contract with Elyon– her life for his– and this means Jack must be the one to complete a mission she left unfinished.

Violent Content
Situations of peril. Some battle scenes involving gunfire. Jack witnesses a political protestor murdered by police in the street. Jack discovers a group of girls who are victims of human trafficking. All are bound and blindfolded.

Drug Content
Jack and his friends visit a club and drink alcohol. Jack takes a pill that a stranger hands him in passing. He reflects on his past as an addict and credits his sister with saving him.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support this blog. I received a free copy of THE HUNT FOR EDEN’S STAR in exchange for my honest review. All opinions my own.