I enjoyed A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, so I was quite eager to read this…and thanks to my oldest nibling, I got the chance to read this.

I really did enjoy this book. It’s a prequel to the original trilogy, and seems to have been written after the others, but I would personally say that it works really well as an introduction to the storyline and characters if people haven’t read the trilogy yet.

I really liked the beginning, with the invitation that came to Pip. I do have to say, though, I felt that the murder mystery game didn’t make things easy for the players, even disregarding the ending of the book and the big reveal. I feel like it would have made playing the game easier if the players were able to read their character booklets before the game was actually due to start…but then again, I guess the story wouldn’t have been as effective if the game company had done the logical thing.

I liked how each of the friend group got involved in the roles they were playing, even Lauren, who was showing signs of her irritating clingy personality with her constant need to message her boyfriend. Cara was my favourite when it came to playing her role, as she seemed to really get into the spirit of the game…plus, I really enjoyed her dramatic gasps every time something happened, or was revealed in the game.

I liked the fact that what had happened with Sal and Andie permeated so much of the book, whether it was Pip thinking about the connection of the murder with the town itself, or the group freaking out because of things that happened during the course of the evening.

If you haven’t read the trilogy, I would say to give this novella a try, as it works as a good introduction to the storyline and the characters. And if you have read the trilogy, I would still recommend reading this…as it’s easy to read and allows a good glimpse into more of the characters from the original books. I would definitely read more books about Pip, Cara, Connor, Jamie and Zach…less so about Lauren and Ant.

(I received a free advance copy of this book in exchange for a review).

I have to admit, this book was very easy to read. It only took me a few hours to get through the whole thing…and the blurb had sounded really interesting. And I did find it quite easy to care about Amy as a character.

Unfortunately, the secondary characters in this book didn’t feel nearly as strong. I didn’t like the fact that all of the men were obsessed with Amy, and that all of the women (with one exception) seemed to hate/be insanely jealous of her. Even the parts of the book not written from Amy’s third person perspective basically had her be the main focus of everyone else’s world.

I think the two police officers could have been really interesting, but with the way that both were trying to warp the narrative (Brandon trying to make it fit Amy being innocent; Mindy trying to make the evidence fit Amy being the culprit). I also found the narration really hard to take seriously when one of the characters was written as literally ‘shaking her booty’. Unfortunately, that threw me straight out of the story and it took me a little while to be able to get back into it again.

Learning about Amy’s past gradually, through the course of the book, rather than all at once worked really well. I did feel bad about what she was going through and what she had gone through…and when it seemed like she’d found someone who would treat her well in the past, I was happy for her, despite knowing things were going to go very badly wrong.

I did figure out the truth behind the ‘friend’ who was messaging Amy fairly early on, although it was still good to see how the events unfolded in any case. And I did like how much Amy ended up second-guessing herself through the book. If there wasn’t the weird, obsessive, instant!love connection (at least on Brandon’s end), I would have liked reading the interactions between Amy and Brandon…although Brandon did seem to pick up a bit by the end of the book. Throughout most of the book, it was easy to suspend my disbelief, even though certain things that happened were a bit weird.

On the whole, this book was easy to read. I would recommend giving it a try if you enjoy reading thrillers and mysteries. Despite the issues I had with the secondary characters, I did keep reading to find out what would happen by the end. I wouldn’t read it a second time, but I think it was worth reading once.

So, this book was one that I decided to get (when I had an Amazon gift voucher) due to various people I knew online enjoying the book and telling me it was good.

I’m very glad I decided to give this book a chance. It was really easy to read, and Juliette was a character who was easy to empathise with. I thought the use of the strikethroughs to show how her thoughts were so chaotic was really unique…and while it did throw me a bit to have numbers written as numbers and not in words (2 instead of two, for instance), it didn’t take long for me to accept that as part of her character.

I wasn’t especially sold on the love triangle that was going on between Juliette, Adam and Werner. All three characters were interesting in their own right, even if Werner came across as a really sadistic, cruel person after trying to force Juliette to use her powers on a toddler. There were hints of more depth to him than how he immediately came across…though I really hope that if he becomes a good guy in later books, his refusal to accept the word ‘No’ is dealt with. Too many books have male characters forcing themselves on female characters and it’s not only treated as normal, but the woman suddenly realises it’s what she wanted all along (I’m looking at you, Carpathian series).

I really liked the fact that, while it was clear Juliette couldn’t actually touch anyone (or be touched by them), it wasn’t immediately clear just what her ability was until later in the book. And learning gradually about her history, not only with Adam but also with her parents and the other schoolchildren when she went to school, was a really good way of introducing her past…even if she did fall into a huge amount of cliches I’ve noticed with many heroines in young adult books.

I really liked Kenji’s character, and I would have liked to see a bit more of him rather than him appearing more towards the end. I really enjoyed his banter with Adam…but was far less sold on the apparent obsession he too developed with Juliette, constantly trying to flirt with her and hit on her. Yeah, he backed off once it was clear that Adam and Juliette was involved, but his refusal to take ‘I’m not interested,’ gracefully really soured my opinion of him as a character…and my view of this book as a whole, if I’m honest. I’m not a big fan of the overpowered woman who becomes the whole centre of every single character’s universe. I’m interested in seeing the world through a character’s eyes, not seeing every other character tell her what an amazing, powerful, ‘We need you so much!’ person she is. Conflicts make characters interesting. Not everyone has to love her and obsess mindlessly over her.

Wow, sorry. That went a bit more ranty than I was planning. Basically, if it wasn’t for everyone becoming so obsessed with Juliette, this book would be a solid four out of five stars. But making pretty much every person only think about her and want to get her, despite there being other people with abilities? Yeah, that’s dropped down the star rating.

I might give the next book in this series a try, but not if I’m going to be only reading about how much everyone wants to get their hands on her…both figuratively and literally. Unfortunately, this book just hit too many of those negative cliches for me by the end…and I’m so annoyed, because I would have enjoyed this so much otherwise.

I was a bit hesitant about buying this book, since even though my sister sent me the link and said, ‘I think this might be something you’d like,’ it was a bit more expensive for a book that was only 100 pages (more of a novella), and there were quite a few mixed reviews about it. But then I bought several books for my KIndle, and that included this book.

I did think that there was a lot of potential to this book. The cover was very striking, and the blurb sounded really intriguing.

Unfortunately, it was really hard to care about all of the characters except for Cat, who was the narrator. For most of the book, it felt like the events were happening in a dream…like it wasn’t really very real. Apart from Cat, the only character who had any real development was the ghost herself…who I felt sorry for the more I learned about her fate and how long she’d been waiting for, with the only company being of the sacrificed girls who wouldn’t be able to keep her warm for very long.

It did seem a bit much that all it took was Talia going to investigate a strange noise for Lin to start talking about horror movie cliches. Sometimes fourth wall breaks work, but this book wasn’t one of those times. And the random insertion about Cat being bisexual came completely out of left field, because the only time it was even mentioned was Lin saying it was why she’d be one of the first killed. Up until that point, it had just been made clear that she had romantic history with…well, all three of the guys in the group.

This book definitely could have done with being longer, allowing for the characters to be more developed. There was a lot of potential…and I did think that the scenes with Cat and the ghost were suitably creepy. I just wish that the other characters had been developed enough so that I’d actually care about what happened to them.