Jennifer Walsh

Trigger warnings: Suicide

6/10, this was an underwhelming Australian young adult crime novel and I'm surprised that my library still has this book considering that it's a decade old now and how obscure it is and I think it never managed to take off in popularity and become well known. The four main characters weren't that impressive to me since they were very barebones and I couldn't connect to them due to them having only one characteristic apiece. Martin was quite closed off and annoying, Kitty was a good writer, Andrea was a good runner and David was a good swimmer and that's it so they were more archetypes than actual characters. The mystery by itself seemed intriguing but the execution ultimately left me feeling that the author could've definitely improved on it by cutting out some filler from the book. The book revolved around the mysterious story of Mr. Woolf who apparently was a bigamist and killed himself but later that was revealed to be only half true. The kids just lived their lives while simultaneously looking for evidence online, in the library and inside the old Tarcoola house before the cartoonish over the top greedy antagonist planned to knock it down and build new apartments in its place which by the looks of it doesn't make the antagonist that evil but it does hamper the progress of the children-led investigation so I suppose that makes him malicious I guess. In the end they just solve the mystery, the house was prevented from being demolished and that was it, a very underwhelming ending to a trainwreck of a book. If you like easy crime novels this one is for you but there are better ones out there like The Inheritance Games series by Jennifer Lynn Barnes that you can read.… (altro)