Pretty Dead Queens follows Cecelia, who moves to the town of Seaview to live with her grandmother, a prolific murder mystery author who based her first book on the real murder of one of her high school classmates. When another student turns up dead, Cecelia sets out to unravel the truth between the latest murder, and how its connected to the fictional murder and the murder from the past. It is a twist filled tale of small town scandal, grief, revenge, and of course, murder.
I did manage to guess a few plot twists early on but there are enough twists and turns in this story that I was still able to be surprised by several others. And the twists I did guess correctly didn’t spoil the story for me. I was still held in tension as I waited to see if my guesses were correct, and the payoff of the grand finale was executed well enough to make me not care if I’d seen the twists coming.
One particular highlight is the reason Cecelia is pushing so hard to investigate the murder. Her mother recently passed away of cancer, which was the catalyst for her moving in with her grandmother in the first place. Her grief is still fresh, and it is what drives Cecelia to investigate the murder. As she says herself, with cancer, there’s no concrete thing to fight, no villain to defeat. But with a murder, she can fight back. With a murder, she can bring justice.
The author has been open about working on this book in the aftermath of losing her own mother, and you can tell. While Cecelia’s recent loss isn’t the central focus of the story, it shines through every aspect, and a not insignificant amount of her meaningful relationships are formed with others that have gone through a similar loss as she has. It’s an element of the story that sets it apart from similar stories in the teen murder mysteries genre.
Pretty Dead Queens comes out on October 4, 2022, and if you pick it up, you’re sure to have a killer time.
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