SURPRISE! A book review!

 Thanks to the global pandemic I'm working from home so I don't have many educational adventures to draw from to revive this blog. Instead, I've got some book reviews to share because let's be real, I've had a lot of reading time on my hands. So what do you say? Ready for an onslaught of my unsolicited opinion?

Let's talk Every Last Fear, an ARC I was excited to request from NetGalley. (If you're a reader/reviewer and don't already have a NetGalley account, be sure to sign up!)

So, the book. 

Matt Pine has been living with his brother's incarceration for years. Older brother Danny was convicted of murdering his girlfriend after an argument at a house party. Matt's family had a hard enough time dealing with his incarceration on their own until the Adlers got involved, a husband and wife director duo who created a documentary for Netflix about Danny's case, a film that proclaimed his innocence and portrayed their hometown as a cesspool of hicks marching around with pitchforks and torches. The Pines-- Liv, Evan, Maggie, Tommy, and Matt- were forced to relocate and their lives were upended by Danny's case.

Now a film student at NYU, Matt learns even more devastating news: the rest of his family, having taken a spur-of-the-moment vacation to Mexico, has been brutally murdered. With the help of FBI Special Agent Keller, Matt tries to unravel his family's last days, figuring out why they went to Mexico in the first place and, more importantly, why they became the target of this heinous crime that was clearly staged to look like an accident.

This book is a nail biter. I stayed up late trying to finish it because I could not put it down and was absolutely not prepared for the twists and turns. I'm generally able to figure out who the real perpetrator is early on in a novel but this book kept me guessing until the very end. The dialogue was realistic, every character drawn out and drawn well, even those who were eliminated in the very first line of the book. No character was expendable; each one played a part and no one was introduced just to have more names on the page. If you like cookie-cutter, cozy mysteries this is not the book for you!