You'll Be The Death Of Me

Might have to pause my manic and sporadic reading habits to catch Karen M. McManus's newest novel, "You'll Be The Death of Me." Because everyone needs a little murder mystery and psychological thriller in their lives every now and again (as long as it's fictional, of course). ;)

["Ivy, Mateo, and Cal used to be close. Now all they have in common is Carlton High and the beginning of a very bad day.

Type A Ivy lost a student council election to the class clown, and now she has to face the school, humiliated. Heartthrob Mateo is burned out--he's been working two jobs since his family's business failed. And outsider Cal just got stood up...again.

So when Cal pulls into campus late for class and runs into Ivy and Mateo, it seems like the perfect opportunity to turn a bad day around. They'll ditch and go into the city. Just the three of them, like old times. Except they've barely left the parking lot before they run out of things to say...

Until they spot another Carlton High student skipping school--and follow him to the scene of his own murder. In one chance move, their day turns from dull to deadly. And it's about to get worse.

It turns out Ivy, Mateo, and Cal still have some things in common. They all have a connection to the dead kid. And they're all hiding something.

Now they're all wondering--could it be that their chance reconnection wasn't by chance after all?"]

This book was...a little anti-climatic. Not the climax itself. The climax itself was really good. The novel actually started picking up right before then (at least halfway through--not until the trio pulled a Scooby Doo and split up, spoiler alert). Until that point, I just felt like I was reading out of obligation (because the rest of her books are soooooo soooo so good--and I feel incredibly guilty for feeling this way about YBTDoM). At that point, maybe halfway through, the plot really picked up. 

Before that, it just felt a little cliched (each of the three kids were old friends but fell out because of social differences right before high school, each had really interesting and embarrassing and potentially illegal secrets they were keeping, each had a shit-load of responsibility and guilt and adulthood on their shoulders even though they were just teenagers) and a little too cookie-cutter for the genre.

Anyway, when the plot did pick up, it was harder and harder to put the novel down. And at that point, I felt a lot more compelled to figure out who done it and why (and how). Until that point, I just...didn't care. I'm not sure if it was because the lack of clues left for readers to figure it out themselves or what. I just... there were too many red herrings and not enough clues (the only clues were red herrings and it was distracting and confusing).

Okay, even ranting. I'm still suggesting you read this novel. Because, well, being a writer (even though I haven't written in forever), I'd want someone to do that same for my hard work, and 99.999% of then time, I'll still recommend a book even though i had issue with it. Then again, maybe I'm juts in a negative mood and took it out of this book and its actually really good, who knows.

Trigger Warnings: death, dying, violence, murder, blackmail, lying, predatory relationships, drugs, drug-use, cheating, framing people for things, illegal activities in general, etc

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