by Gretchen McNeil
Hardcover, 294 pages
Published September 18th 2012 by Balzer + Bray
ISBN 0062118781 (ISBN13: 9780062118783)


Blurb

SHHHH!
Don’t spread the word!
Three-day weekend. Party at White Rock House on Henry Island.
You do NOT want to miss it.

It was supposed to be the weekend of their lives—an exclusive house party on Henry Island. Best friends Meg and Minnie each have their reasons for being there (which involve T.J., the school’s most eligible bachelor) and look forward to three glorious days of boys, booze and fun-filled luxury.

But what they expect is definitely not what they get, and what starts out as fun turns dark and twisted after the discovery of a DVD with a sinister message: Vengeance is mine.

Suddenly people are dying, and with a storm raging, the teens are cut off from the outside world. No electricity, no phones, no internet, and a ferry that isn’t scheduled to return for two days. As the deaths become more violent and the teens turn on each other, can Meg find the killer before more people die? Or is the killer closer to her than she could ever imagine?

The Good

  1. The cover.  I am one of those people who picks out books to read based on their covers and my gosh, this cover is fantastically creepy!

  2. The mystery.  The mystery in this book was well structured and despite forshadowing you aren’t completely sure of the killer until the final reveal.

  3. The murders.  The way the murders are described feels fairly realistic. McNeil didn’t try to shelter her readers from the gory details simply because her target audience was YA.


The Bad

  1. The stereotypes.  None of the characters felt very unique and there was little to no character development, with the exception of Minnie’s issues which are at least partiall explained.

  2. The “clues”.  There are written clues which appear throughout the novel, and they are just not very believable. One is a journal in which the person writing it does not refer to anyone by their name. No one would do this.

  3. The reactions to the murders.  The reactions the kids have when people start dying are slightly less dramatic than expected. I don’t know about you, but if I was stuck on an island in a house filled with people I barely knew and one of them happened to be a murderer, I would be a complete and total mess.


Overall Rating

I didn’t love this book, but I didn’t hate it either. The mystery was interesting, but there was no real character development and the book was overall pretty unmemorable.