Author: Hannah Morrissey
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Date Published: October 31, 2023
I would say it would be great to be back in Black Harbor, but oh what a bleak place! The way the author paints the town, you just know you would never want to live there, either by birth or accident. You can just feel the dreariness, poverty, and crime creeping around the edges.
Hannah Morrissey writes dark, intelligent thrillers but she’s not afraid of using humor to break up the bits between the gore. “Libby’s eyes land on a copper-colored vintage [wine] labeled Hallowine. She remembers sampling it once from her mother’s glass and immediately making a face. It tasted like licking the basement floor.”
While the adults in the book could have used a little more development, the teenagers were on point and included mean girls, victims, and secret connections. And because of Morrissey’s background as a police transcriber, the book had a good frame of reference for the police and medical examiner procedural. Are you able to guess the perpetrator partway through the book? Yes. Was it Morrissey’s intention? I believe it was.
I have liked all of the the author’s Black Harbor, and I know if Morrissey writes it I will buy it!
Thanks to NetGalley and Minotaur Books for an advance reader’s copy.
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