Review: Truly, Madly, Deadly

Truly, Madly, Deadly
by Hannah Jayne

Plot Summary:

They Said It Was An Accident...

Sawyer Dodd is a star athlete, a straight-A student, and the envy of every other girl who wants to date Kevin Anderson. When Kevin dies in a tragic car crash, Sawyer is stunned. Then she opens her locker to find a note:

You're welcome.

Someone saw what he did to her. Someone knows that Sawyer and Kevin weren't the perfect couple they seemed to be. And that someone—a killer—is now shadowing Sawyer's every move...

Review:

This is classic teen thriller fare with a great chilling premise.  At least the selling point for me was the idea in the summary of finding such a simple, presumptive note in your locker after your boyfriend has died.  It's a great idea but on the whole, I think this book failed to deliver on the paranoid fear I was hoping to get.  And while I really think this is an entertaining book, good for something lightly sinister and intriguing, the two things that really disappointed me was Sawyer Dodd as a character and the fact that it's just way too easy to guess who the culprit is - almost from the first scene I knew who it had to be, and subsequent scenes only reinforced it.

Oh Sawyer, why were you feeding so much power to the killer?  I just didn't get why she wouldn't talk to someone about what was happening to her.  It didn't have to be authority, but her friends at least.  I kept coming back to that while I was reading, and it really made me less sympathetic to Sawyer's plight.  I wish there was something else to her character to make up for that, but her character felt too much like other angsty, misunderstood teenagers to really stand out.  To be honest I really didn't understand why everyone was so crazy about her.  I also didn't understand the unreasonable antipathy Maggie felt for Sawyer.  It seemed like Maggie had hidden reasons for her intense dislike of Sawyer, and at one time she said something that I thought would be important, but it wasn't brought up again at all.

The main male lead, Cooper was sadly flat and cardboard.  He seemed like he was just there to support Sawyer as needed, and although I really hope I won't go through the grief Sawyer did, I just didn't understand Sawyer's behavior and almost immediate attachment to Cooper after he says some nice things to her.  It might be her coping mechanism but it's so disappointingly superficial.

It's hard to tell how to review this book because I did read it quickly and I was interested in knowing how it would be resolved, but at the same time I was not very invested in the characters and I was pretty much high-fiving myself when I got to the reveal of the killer.  The story seemed disjointed because I was so clueless as to the motivations behind so many characters' actions.  So while this is a fast-paced read with an interesting story, it was pretty unmemorable for me.  If you don't figure out who the killer is, it would probably be much more enjoyable.

I received this book from the publisher or author for a fair and honest review.  I was not compensated for this review.

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