YA Thrillers

At one point early this summer, I had every intention of reading as many recently-published YA ghost stories, murder mysteries, and psychological thrillers as possible and putting together a lengthy blog post reviewing them all. But this year has frankly been a slow reading year for me, and in the last several months, I have succeeded in finishing reading only three books that fall into that general grouping of genres. Now that we’re in a new calendar year and it’s time for me to wrap up my 2022 reading and put together my Best Books of 2022 list, I’m going ahead and posting the three reviews I do have.

Dead Girls Can’t Tell Secrets by Chelsea Ichaso, 2022

After golden girl Piper Sullivan falls from a cliff known as Suicide Point, leaving her comatose and unlikely to recover, everyone assumes that it was a suicide attempt. Everyone except her family, that is. Her parents assume it was an accidental fall, and her older sister Savannah is sure someone tried to kill Piper. Armed with a single clue, she decides to infiltrate the wilderness survival club that her sister had recently joined. Coincidentally, all of Piper’s closest friends and most bitter rivals are in this club. Savannah joins them for a weekend-long trip and pieces together the intricate web of lies, schemes, and damaged relationships that converged the day of Piper’s fall. Along the way, every member of the club is at some point the prime suspect. And everyone, Savannah included, turns out to be guilty of something. Although the premise is intriguing, the twists and turns come in such short succession that they lose most of their thrill value, and the big revelation about Savannah’s role in the tragedy happens a little too soon (and with far too many hints beforehand) for maximum dramatic effect. The resolution to the mystery is somewhat anticlimactic, but the numerous appeal factors still add up to make this book a worthwhile read for whodunnit fans.

Summer’s Edge by Dana Mele, 2022

Just like every other summer, Chelsea is meeting her friends Kennedy, Ryan, and Chase (plus “the new girl”, Mila) at Kennedy’s family’s summer home. But this year is different. Last year’s vacation ended in a tragic fire that killed Emily. Chelsea’s memories of the incident are a little unclear and she spent most of the year in a psychiatric hospital, but now that they’re back together in the summer house, Chelsea starts to feel as if someone is leaving spooky, supernatural hints about what really happened. Later chapters from Kennedy’s perspective give some additional details about the drama and conflicts that occurred in previous summers, and it gradually becomes clear that no one is innocent and everyone has suppressed their memories of what really happened during the last two summers. The first half of the book leaves quite a bit to be desired in terms of characterization and pace of exposition; despite the small cast of characters, it’s a little hard to keep track of which personality traits and which backstories have been attributed to whom, and many of the allusions to past events are awkwardly placed and slow down the storyline too much. But the spooky twists and turns later in the book are well worth the wait, and the story culminates with the kind of satisfying surprise ending that feels as if it should have been obvious all along. I strongly recommend reading this book relatively quickly, perhaps during a vacation. 

The Girl in the Castle by James Patterson and Emily Raymond, 2022

Eighteen-year-old Hannah lives a double life. In one life, it’s 2023 and she has just been readmitted to a New York psychiatric hospital after having a hallucination-related breakdown in public. In the other life, it’s 1347 and she’s a starving peasant who is desperate for an opportunity to save her family and fellow villagers. Meanwhile, Jordan Hassan is a college student who is starting an internship at Belman Psychiatric Hospital. He takes an immediate interest in Hannah, whose psychotic episodes are completely unlike textbook schizophrenia. And strangely enough, in all the time Hannah has spent at Belman, nobody knows anything about her past or her family. She answers those kinds of questions by sharing details about her medieval life, in which she loses her sister and husband-to-be in a failed raid on the castle kitchen but ends up catching the eye of the baron and managing to provide for what’s left of her family by persuading him to send help. Jordan is determined to be the savior and figure out how to cure Hannah’s psychological disease that has stumped her doctors, but she is equally determined to persuade him that her time-traveling episodes are real. Predictably, they develop a mutual crush that interferes with Hannah’s mental well-being. Although this psychological thriller is an engaging read full of mysteries and surprises, it leads up to an overly-fast-paced and unsatisfying ending, culminating with a very short epilogue that doesn’t give nearly enough information about what happened in the seven years between chapters 109 and 110. Recommended for avid readers of psychological thrillers, but don’t put this one on the top of your reading list if you don’t have a lot of time on your hands.