April, 2025
April 4th, 2025, 6:05 p.m. - Adding Pliego to my list of authors to keep an eye out for
13. You Are Fatally Invited (Ande Pliego)
Up next: Bright and Tender Dark (Joanna Pearson)
April 12th, 2025, 2:28 p.m. - The market for books where characters revist decades-old murders is definitely oversaturated
14. Bright and Tender Dark (Joanna Pearson)
Up next: A Killing Cold (Kate Alice Marshall)
April 18th, 2025, 4:53 p.m. - Marshall's best yet
15. A Killing Cold (Kate Alice Marshall)
Up next: Where You End (Abbott Kahler)
April 18th, 2025, 4:53 p.m. - Eh
16. Where You End (Abbott Kahler)
Up next: We Are Watching (Alison Gaylin)
This was a really creative twist on an And Then There Were None take-off. I'm impressed with Pliego's writing; this doesn't feel like a debut. It was slightly overwritten and it was kind of confusing to try to keep everyone's secrets straight, considering how vague they were, but all in all, this was solid.
This was almost perfect. Unfortunately, the imperfection is pretty big: The reader doesn't get enough information to be able to put together what happened. There are too many voices in the book, and most of them are red herrings.
Some people thought this moved too slowly, but I thought it was well-paced. Enough developments and twists popped up along the way to keep it from feeling like it was dragging. There were one or two too many characters, but that did make it more challenging (in a good way) to figure out who was a villain. I'm also happy and relieved that the plot was so original, since a lot of thrillers these days feel like they're just rewrites of the same five or six ideas.
I never really connected with this. I thought it would be more of a thriller than it was. It unfolded too slowly and I was never that invested in finding out what Jude was hiding.