By Karen M. McManus

“While this could definitely be a fun, entertaining thriller, the annoying characters, slow pacing, and cookie-cutter plot made it probably my least favorite of McManus’s books. I’d recommend it to fans of the YA realistic fiction mystery genre, or people just looking for an easy read.”

Summary

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 re-connection wasn’t by chance after all?

From the author of One of Us Is Lying comes a brand-new pulse-pounding thriller. It’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with murder when three old friends relive an epic ditch day, and it goes horribly–and fatally–wrong.

My Thoughts

I started off really excited for this YA murder mystery. I mean, McManus wrote One of Us Is Lying, which is still one of my favorite thrillers to date. I also absolutely loved Nothing More To Tell, even if everything started to feel like a repeat of her first hit mystery. 

Unfortunately, this was exactly the same. It’s starting to feel as though McManus has a fixed set of characters and plotlines, and every time she writes a new book she just switches the names. A group of Breakfast Club-style teens find themselves way too close to a murder of some sort, and end up having to solve it on their own for various reasons. Sounds interesting until you read the same thing five times. 

The biggest drawback was probably the pacing. It started out excruciatingly slow, with the characters just suddenly deciding to skip school and do absolutely nothing but go to a donut shop and conveniently walk past the place where someone gets murdered. The summary describes it as “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with murder,” but they did actually interesting stuff in that movie. You’ll Be The Death of Me just involves them walking around visiting people and stealing “evidence.” When everything does pick up, McManus’s signature twists just end up feeling forced and out of place with the rate they’re actually finding things. They mostly just stumble upon evidence too, or someone conveniently explains it to them. 

The romance plots were a problem, too. For one, Ivy was extremely annoying and Mateo had no personality other than being a “heartthrob” to quote the summary, even if his love for his family was believable. Them together was even worse. They fabricated an entire relationship in the span of a day and somehow just picked up where they left off in eighth grade. Their recurring Sugar Baby inside joke thing was cute, but maybe ya’ll should’ve been concentrating on your dead classmate and not on figuring out who intercepted Mateo’s little love note so long ago. 

And Cal and Lara? I’m not going to say anything about how uncomfy their relationship was and why because *spoilersss* but I was forced. And weird. And made Cal look stupid. 

Even the mystery itself felt boring. By only a few chapters in, I knew who was involved and what it was about. Sure, I didn’t have all the information, but nothing made me care enough to find out. There weren’t really any high stakes for the characters, no personal attachment. Ivy was being framed for the murder, but that could’ve been cleared up easily if they’d just talked to the police. They weren’t involved enough to get in trouble, therefore there was no reason for them to be so intent on solving it alone. 

Some good things though: it got kind of interesting at the end with the big twist (I was decidedly not expecting it) and the action definitely sped up. It was definitely entertaining in a beach read sort of way, I didn’t really have to pay a lot of attention to what was going on and could just be pulled along for the ride as the characters worked through the mystery. It still had that thriller vibe as well, so I didn’t feel completely bored or anything. 

However, I had a big problem with the way it described the drug crisis. I felt like it didn’t do a good job of explaining the problems with dealing or drugs in general. It almost glamorized it, really. They got in trouble for it, but nobody addressed the intrinsic issues with drugs other than legal punishment. Dealing was almost portrayed as a way to make a ton of cash, as long as you didn’t get caught. Which is wrong. 

Don’t do drugs, kids. 

Anyway, the fact that it took place over a single day made it even harder to read. I couldn’t get to know the characters well because their entire backstories were explained briefly and from very narrow perspectives. I couldn’t understand the scope of the issues at hand because the entire mystery was solved so fast. You’d think that such a small amount of time would create really fast, interesting pacing, but as I’ve already said, everything felt so slow. 

While this could definitely be a fun, entertaining thriller, the annoying characters, slow pacing, and cookie-cutter plot made it probably my least favorite of McManus’s books. I’d recommend it to fans of the YA realistic fiction mystery genre, or people just looking for an easy read.

P.S: I didn’t like the title. It made no sense with the story and kind of just seemed like a random death pun they decided was funny. The cover was cool though, I love all of her covers.