Sophie Winters nearly died. Twice. The first time, she’s fourteen, and escapes a near-fatal car accident with scars, a bum leg, and an addiction to Oxy that’ll take years to kick. The second time, she’s seventeen, and it’s no accident. Sophie and her best friend Mina are confronted by a masked man in the woods. Sophie survives, but Mina is not so lucky. When the cops deem Mina’s murder a drug … murder a drug deal gone wrong, casting partial blame on Sophie, no one will believe the truth: Sophie has been clean for months, and it was Mina who led her into the woods that night for a meeting shrouded in mystery.
After a forced stint in rehab, Sophie returns home to a chilly new reality. Mina’s brother won’t speak to her, her parents fear she’ll relapse, old friends have become enemies, and Sophie has to learn how to live without her other half. To make matters worse, no one is looking in the right places and Sophie must search for Mina’s murderer on her own. But with every step, Sophie comes closer to revealing all: about herself, about Mina and about the secret they shared.
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Tess Sharp uses first person narrative to tell a story dealing with many of the issues with which today’s teens must cope. The plot is multifaceted, switching from the present to flashbacks. The book is both a coming of age saga and a gripping criminal investigation novel.
Someone needs to make this book into a movie, is what I’m going to start with.
If you look this book up online, you’ll immediately find that it has a pretty good rating on Goodreads. I don’t blame them, really – I would have given it a very high rating myself too! I started reading this on Christmas Eve Eve, and finished it on the 27th of December, literally holding myself awake on some nights with the promise of ‘just one more chapter’. It helps that this book is written in a style that mirrors my own writing style, but what really grabbed me what was the story line.
Every good book, I believe, starts in media res. No good book starts you in the beginning and keeps you going from there, building up the story. There are some good books that do that, but those are usually the ones that need volumes upon volumes to tell you the story, building it up as it goes along. If we’re talking about a one-novel affair here, then the story never starts in the beginning, but right in the middle of the action, where it’s most likely to grab your attention.
This story starts with our main character, Sophie, telling us about how she’s almost died twice. The first time, she was in a car accident that left her crippled for life. The second time, she witnessed her best friend killed by a lone gunman. Sophie is a drug addict, who has been addicted to pain killers since the accident that left her crippled and unable to walk without a limp (and, in extreme cases, without a cane). She is clean, and finds herself counting the hours since the last time she had a hit of Oxy, convincing herself that she’s made too much progress to regress into the vicious cycle now. But Sophie’s best friend, Mina, was killed right in front of her, and everybody thinks that it’s Sophie fault, as Sophie was found at the scene of the crime with pills in her jacket pocket. Everybody seems to think that she took Mina with her to buy drugs, and the drug deal went wrong, resulting in Mina’s death. Nobody will believe that Sophie had been clean for six months prior to Mina getting killed, and that Mina would never let her buy drugs and start the cycle all over again. And so, the minute that Sophie leaves rehab, she’s on a quest to find out who really killed her best friend, and why.
This story is 70% murder mystery, 20% drug addiction, and 10% grief. Sophie never had the time to properly grieve the death of her best friend, and has trouble accepting that she’s gone forever. The story, completely told through first person POV, gives us flashbacks into Sophie’s friendship with Mina, and how it grew and became the strong bond it is when the story picks up. Sophie and Mina’s friendship is a pure spectacle of teenage love – two friends who rely on each other so completely, who have no idea what they’d do without the other, and who are finally faced with the unthinkable when one of them dies and they finally have to do what they’ve dreaded the most. Sophie’s emotions and anger over Mina’s death are so real that it’s very hard to not feel some kind of emotion while reading this book.
What I liked about this book as well is the way that Sharpe had me guessing up until the end about who the murderer was. I went through various different answers in my head before finally reaching the end, and by the time it was revealed, I found myself saying ‘This is fucked up’ to myself quite a bit as I finished the book. The only part of the Goodreads reviews that I disagree with, in fact, are that the ending was predictable, which it isn’t. I was expecting somebody completely different to be the murderer, not the person it turned out to be.
All in all, I give this book a final rating of 5/5. It’s got a brilliant story line, one that makes you confront your worst nightmare if you had to place you and your best friend as Sophie and Mina. It also includes subtle hints at romance that aren’t the ‘be all, end all’ of the story, which is nice. And, like I said, the ending is rather unpredictable!
Go read it!
After almost dying the second time, Sophie resolves to find her best friend’s killer, even when it means endangering herself. A suspenseful murder mystery from Tess Sharpe w/ an intricate non-linear structure & a heart-thudding race to a conclusion that doesn’t disappoint.