Blog Tour: Dead To Me

Publisher: Disney-Hyperion

Release Date: March 3rd 2015

Rate: 4 out of 5 stars

Synopsis:

LA Confidential for the YA audience. This alluring noir YA mystery with a Golden Age Hollywood backdrop will keep you guessing until the last page.

“Don’t believe anything they say.”

Those were the last words that Annie spoke to Alice before turning her back on their family and vanishing without a trace. Alice spent four years waiting and wondering when the impossibly glamorous sister she idolized would return to her–and what their Hollywood-insider parents had done to drive her away.

When Annie does turn up, the blond, broken stranger lying in a coma has no answers for her. But Alice isn’t a kid anymore, and this time she won’t let anything stand between her and the truth, no matter how ugly. The search for those who beat Annie and left her for dead leads Alice into a treacherous world of tough-talking private eyes, psychopathic movie stars, and troubled starlets–and onto the trail of a young runaway who is the sole witness to an unspeakable crime. What this girl knows could shut down a criminal syndicate and put Annie’s attacker behind bars–if Alice can find her first. And she isn’t the only one looking

Evoking classic film noir, debut novelist Mary McCoy brings the dangerous glamour of Hollywood’s Golden Age to life, where the most decadent parties can be the deadliest, and no drive into the sunset can erase the crimes of past.

(I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a review).(This review may contain spoilers).

I did have a little bit of a slow start with this book. I found the blurb really interesting when I was originally invited to take part in the blog tour, but when I started reading this book, I found myself really confused about what age the main character was supposed to be. That confusion did settle after a while, though.

The atmosphere in this book was really tense and I felt it didn’t really let up – which was good, but made it a bit exhausting to read. I found myself able to relate really well to Alice as a character and I felt really bad about what she and her sister went through with parents who basically paraded them around as ornaments.

I think my favourite part of this book was probably the part about the codes… but I didn’t really understand much about the whole cipher. Still, I felt a lot of work had gone into that part of the book and it really showed.

I’ve mentioned, on more than one occasion to various people, that I feel celebrities are treated as different to other people. I see news articles where things that would be normal for non-famous people are made a massive deal of and that they are treated as vastly different to people the public don’t see as important. And I felt this came across really well in this book – the idea that the celebrities were supposed to be untouchable; that people would cover up what they’d done and make it so that they didn’t get into trouble for anything.

By the end of this book, I really disliked Alice’s father… though I liked her mother better. I also really liked seeing Alice’s relationships with Cassie and Jerry. It was good to see a friendship that still managed to weather the bad, despite one of the people in the friendship completely stepping back. (For reasons that might have been good, but still…)

I’m not sure I should have, but I did like Ruth as a character. And Millie was also quite intriguing.

I also felt that the actions Alice took in the book were believable. I could get behind her as a heroine and it would be really good to see a sequel with more of her and some of the other characters in… though not really Annie.

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Mary McCoy is a librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library. She has also been a contributor to On Bunker Hill and the 1947project, where she wrote stories about Los Angeles’s notorious past. She grew up in western Pennsylvania and studied at Rhodes College and the University of Wisconsin. Mary now lives in Los Angeles with her husband. Her debut novel, Dead To Me, is a YA mystery set in the glamorous, treacherous world of 1940s Hollywood.