I usually like Lapena’s books because they’re quick, engrossing reads, and to be fair, this one was too. The only disappointing thing was I felt like the murderer was SO obvious the entire time. That was a bummer because the three main suspects had great reasons to be accused but I could never get caught up in the suspense of their questioning because I knew it was this other character the whole time.
SPOILERS!
I knew Evan was the murderer because his point of view was shared through journal entries. All the other characters were told in third person point of view, with the exception of Diana. (Don’t get me started on the Lovely Bones ripoff of her narrative style, either.) So if the victim has a unique point of view and so does one other character, it seems like a neon flashing arrow pointing at that other person as the murderer. Plus, he’s a wRiTeR yet his entries are SO bland I wanted to skip them completely. I knew he was lying and making up stories. I feel like someone writing lies in a journal is a pretty common trope, especially in YA, and this book honestly could have been YA (not an insult at all, I love YA!). Overall, I think there was a way Lapena could have included him in the third person narration without making him seem like a suspect so the twist would have worked better.
Beyond Evan’s boring journal entries, I felt like Paula and her daughter were added in for no good reason. I kept expecting them to take on larger roles but they just added a bit of fluff to the story, and I think it would have been tighter and more suspenseful without them watering it down. I kept forgetting about Paula, Taylor, and whatever Paula’s husband was named… Martin? Then there were several other couples and their kids mentioned a few times in passing and I always had to stop and think of the name and try to remember who was who. I get that she’s trying to build out the population of this small town, but it was confusing to have all these minor characters sharing first and last names in the book and only showing up a few times.
On that note… this was the weirdest small town! It was close knit and crime free yet had a Home Depot for Diana’s work… while her mom had to drive towns over to work at a hospital? A lot of those details didn’t ring true for me. I also felt like the text from Diana’s phone, days after her death, was so random. I would think the cops would focus on tracing that but it seems completely forgotten. It seems like it was just a way for Riley to find Diana’s phone in Evan’s room, but she could have noticed it even without the text on her mind, so the text was a strange thread to try to weave in, in my opinion.
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