I was drawn into this book from the first chapter and the eerie quality of the tale continued until the very end. It's definitely a complex puzzle of a mystery, and although I pretty much figured out where it was heading, that didn't take away from my experience.
The beginning starts with a bang--four family members of the Pine family are found dead while on a trip to Mexico. Their surviving son Matt is contacted at NYU where he's attending school and told that he has to go to Mexico to claim the bodies. But first--he has to go to the prison in upstate New York where his brother Danny is serving a life sentence for killing his high school girlfriend. On the surface, this seems fairly straightforward, but Danny has been featured in a documentary that promotes his innocence, and all members of the family have been ardent supporters of Danny's innocence--except Matt.
This tale is exciting, with overlapping motives and the reader is never sure who is telling the truth and who is innocent. The portions containing excerpts of the documentary seem like they could be totally real and mirror so many true crime documentaries that I've seen. I connected with Matt and could feel the internal dilemmas he faced at every turn. The secondary cast of characters including the FBI agent and Matt's friends are all incredibly developed as well, which takes great skill by the writer in order to create a broader more interesting story.
Excellent debut novel from a writer to watch!
The beginning starts with a bang--four family members of the Pine family are found dead while on a trip to Mexico. Their surviving son Matt is contacted at NYU where he's attending school and told that he has to go to Mexico to claim the bodies. But first--he has to go to the prison in upstate New York where his brother Danny is serving a life sentence for killing his high school girlfriend. On the surface, this seems fairly straightforward, but Danny has been featured in a documentary that promotes his innocence, and all members of the family have been ardent supporters of Danny's innocence--except Matt.
This tale is exciting, with overlapping motives and the reader is never sure who is telling the truth and who is innocent. The portions containing excerpts of the documentary seem like they could be totally real and mirror so many true crime documentaries that I've seen. I connected with Matt and could feel the internal dilemmas he faced at every turn. The secondary cast of characters including the FBI agent and Matt's friends are all incredibly developed as well, which takes great skill by the writer in order to create a broader more interesting story.
Excellent debut novel from a writer to watch!