So, I picked up this book because the title and the cover both really intrigued me. And then I read the blurb, and I immediately thought this book sounded interesting…and different enough to hold my attention, over all the young adult books with really similar plots I keep seeing.

I felt that the book had a really strong start. Being a writer myself, there were some really interesting moral issues raised even from the very first paragraph. As a writer, it is true that I have killed characters in service of the plot. Never for no reason, though. I don’t do it just for shock value like I’m aware some people do.

But…going back to the book itself, I thought it got off to a really interesting start. As a writer myself, it’s interesting to consider the effects that a book can have on someone. And being addressed by who I assumed was the killer, about kidnapping a writer, was a really interesting idea.

I was a bit disappointed that the book started with Katie having been kidnapped, because it seemed to remove a lot of the mystery that the blurb promised. I’m a strong believer that less is more…and while this is mostly to do with movies (especially horror movies), I think the same is true for books as well.

This book also completely changed genres about halfway through and that…really ruined the book for me. I felt there was no foreshadowing for it to suddenly turn into a fantasy, and what had been shown before didn’t match up with the sudden swerve into fantasy territory. I mean…why was the killer writing messages to Lyla? I kind of get that maybe the whole speaking to the lead detective was meant to be Katie’s plan, but given that she didn’t even seem to know about Lyla until she saw the newspaper article…I felt it really fell short. And the other two ‘twists’ just felt like the book had lost its way somewhere along the second or third murder.

This book could have worked well as a fantasy thriller if there’d been more foreshadowing before the sudden swerve, but sadly, by the point that was revealed…I just lost my suspension of disbelief. By the end of the book, I couldn’t help wondering if this had actually been written with the help of AI. Mostly, this was due to a scene where Katie presses her forehead against another character’s…and that’s an action that seems to occur a lot in AI writing that I’ve seen.

Whether written with AI or not (and it’s pretty sad that I now have to consider that as a possibility when reading books), this really wasn’t as good as I was hoping it would be. It definitely could have been improved…and there is such a thing as too many twists, especially when these aren’t foreshadowed at all.

Unfortunately, this book simply wasn’t one I enjoyed reading…and I wouldn’t seek out another book by this author unless it was completely different to this one, and didn’t give me a sudden genre switch partway through. Because there’s not much more jarring than a sudden shift to fantasy when reading a thriller that had no hint of it until quite a way into the book.