I received this ARC on Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

Title: Last Girl Lied To

Author: L.E. Flynn

Genre: Young Adult, Mystery, Contemporary

Pages: 352

Publisher: Imprint

Publication Date: April 16, 2019

Something made him angry that night.
Something made her cry.
Something made Trixie disappear.
What if it was all the same thing?

Fiona claims she doesn’t remember anything about the night her best friend left a party early and walked into the ocean. But the truth is, she wishes she could forget.

Trixie’s disappearance is ruled a suicide, but Fiona starts to believe that Trixie isn’t really dead. Piecing together the trail of a girl who doesn’t want to be found leads her to Jasper, Trixie’s former friend with benefits, and Beau—the boy who turned Fiona down, who loved someone else, who might be happy Trixie is gone.

The closer Fiona gets to finding out what happened, and the closer she gets to Jasper and Beau, the more she realizes that the girl she knew better than anyone may have been a carefully constructed lie—and she might have been waiting to disappear the entire time.

Told in alternating chapters between the past and the present, Last Girl Lied To is a gripping emotional thriller.

Goodreads

This is a fantastic YA mystery. I flew through this book and it was so hard for me to put down. I really connected with the main character, Fiona, so much. And I’m in my early 30’s. If I was still a teenager I would have loved her even more. Fiona is messy and sometimes makes wrong choices but most of these choices come from her being in pain or her need to feel loved. The characters in this book all felt realistic which kept me wanting to find out what was going to happen next to them. The pacing of the story was also really well done. There would be some stuff happening and then it would skip ahead  in time but nothing ever felt rushed. I actually liked that not everything happened in a short amount of time.

Also, the mystery of her trying to figure out what exactly happened to her friend, Trixie was giving me major Pretty Little Liar vibes. The stories aren’t all that similar but it is about a friend dying and trying to figure out what happened in the backdrop of high school drama. So, I guess sort of similar. Except it’s basically just Fiona trying to figure stuff out and there is no A or threatening text messages.  It could be that I have PLL on the brain since the spinoff has started but I do really think that if you enjoyed PLL that you will like this book too.

I do want to point out that Fiona does reference her weight a lot in the book and I know for me, that would have been really triggering if I was still a teenage girl. It was making me uncomfortable at times reading it but I do think that it also helped to make Fiona more of a realistic character. I think a lot of people will identify with her but I know that for some of us that kind of talk can be harmful. There is no reference to her actual weight in the book just how Fiona feels in her body and how she perceives others to see her.

For me the ending of this book was predictable but I still really enjoyed it. There were parts of the final reveal that I didn’t see coming. Also, the way the reveal was done was so good. We had been building to the reveal the whole book and it didn’t disappoint at all. The actual ending was a pretty typical YA ending but since I was so invested in the characters I didn’t mind it too much.

This book comes out today and I hope that if it at all sounds intriguing to you that you check it out. If you usually shy away from mysteries but enjoy YA contemporaries than I strongly recommend this book to you. Even if you don’t really read YA but enjoy mysteries or contemporaries than I still think you would enjoy this book. I will definitely be checking out Flynn’s past novel and anything else she writes in the future.

~Cassie

Title: What She Knew

Author: Gilly Macmillian

Pages: 512

Genre: Mystery, Crime

Publisher: Harpers Collins Publishers

Publication Date: December 1, 2015

Rating: 4/5

Rachel Jenner is walking in a Bristol park with her eight-year-old son, Ben, when he asks if he can run ahead. It’s an ordinary request on an ordinary Sunday afternoon, and Rachel has no reason to worry—until Ben vanishes.

Police are called, search parties go out, and Rachel, already insecure after her recent divorce, feels herself coming undone. As hours and then days pass without a sign of Ben, everyone who knew him is called into question, from Rachel’s newly married ex-husband to her mother-of-the-year sister. Inevitably, media attention focuses on Rachel too, and the public’s attitude toward her begins to shift from sympathy to suspicion. 

As she desperately pieces together the threadbare clues, Rachel realizes that the greatest dangers may lie not in the anonymous strangers of every parent’s nightmares, but behind the familiar smiles of those she trusts the most.

Where is Ben? The clock is ticking…

Goodreads

This book had me hooked from the beginning. The prologue starts us off 1 year past Rachel’s son, Ben, going missing. The story is told from Rachel’s perspective and one of the lead investigators Jim. Some of Jim’s story is also told through notes his therapist took. I really love when books are able to play with different formats because when done right it really keeps up the momentum of the story. I read this book on my kindle and I had no idea until I was putting this blog post together that this is 512 pages. It honestly felt like a 300 page book which I really feel like speaks to what a compelling story this is.

I really like the character of Rachel and I quickly connected to her. Ben is a 8 year old boy and my two oldest are 7 and 9 and I couldn’t help but put myself in her shoes. Her son asks if he can run ahead to the car while they are walking the dog and she lets him. When she gets to the car she obviously can’t find him or the dog and this sets off the judgement of people everywhere. Throughout the book there are blog posts and news articles with comments at the end that are filled with so much judgement and hate for Rachel and her decision to let him go ahead. Rachel’s story felt so real to me and I appreciated how flushed out her story felt with all the people in her life. She has to deal with her ex husband and his new wife, her best friend and also her sister, along with Ben’s school. It was interesting to see how people reacted and dealt with Ben missing and all the different dynamics.

The other big part of the book is the police investigation to find Ben. This was a very comprehensive look at how an investigation is run and all the people involved. This was the part of the book that frustrated me the most because it was so irritating some of the stuff they would and wouldn’t do. But I also think that was the point since this is the first book in a series starring Jim. Obviously from the first time we meet Jim we know that things don’t end up to great for him and this is the story of explaining how he got there. It just really rubbed me the wrong way when the cops would get a piece of evidence and then say that it probably wasn’t too important and they will look into after they go down this other avenue of investigation. To be fair though, a lot of that frustration could be due to the fact that I watched the first 3 episodes of the Adnan Syed documentary on HBO while I was reading this. Syed was convicted based on a timeline that the cops forced to fit into their evidence even though it doesn’t hold up once you start looking at it. (Just for the record I’m not saying he did or didn’t do it. I just don’t think a person should spend their life in prison based on a flawed timeline. Our justice system needs to be better than that.) If the evidence is taking you in a different direction you should follow the evidence and not get fixated on the person you think did it. This is obviously quite different than the Syed case where that is a murder and this is a missing kid. You obviously need to find the perpetrator as quickly as possible so you can find the child as soon as possible. But you can still do that while also looking at all the new evidence at the same time.

So now that I have gone on a mini rant about our justice system let me wrap this up by saying that this is a fantastically written mystery and crime fiction novel. I thought for a long time that this would be a five star read but I unfortunately really struggled with the actions of the police. I do plan on continuing on with the series and I am looking forward to seeing Jim handles another investigation and how this first one changed him.

~Cassie