This was an okay book about a serial killer who terrorises a small town. Makani is a girl with A Past and she's moved to Osborne, Nebraska to live with her grandma and put he past behind her. But then a serial killer strikes and Makani's past doesn't want to stay buried.
I thought this book was an okay read but it didn't blow me away as much as I'd hoped. The pacing was kind of slow in parts, although there were also parts that were really tense and enjoyable. The characters were really great, as I would have expected from Stephanie Perkins, so that kept me reading.
I think it was a brave decision to reveal the identity of the killer halfway through the book and I'm not sure whether it paid off. A couple of chapters in I was really certain who the killer was and I was proven wrong and the killer turned out to be someone who (I don't think) had been mentioned up until then so there was no big reveal and their motives weren't really that clear. When the motivation was eventually revealed, it turned out to be a bit of an anti climax. I kept expecting there to be a big twist, like 'Ha ha ha - that's not the real killer! The real killer is X', but it never cam so I started to not really care about who might be bumped off next.
I liked the romance in this book but at times it overshadowed the crime aspect. There's only one reason for a romance to be included in a crime story and that's to provide hamartia or motivation. The romance never gets to play a lead role, except here it did. Stephanie Perkins is a really skilled romance writer (I adored Lola and the Boy Next Door) but if she wanted to change genres, she should have changed genres and not just smooshed two genres together. It felt like a bit of a mess and slowed the pace right down.
All in all this was kind of a mixed bag. Not bad by any stretch, but maybe a little bit too navel-gazey compared to other crime books.
3 stars