My sister is slacking! Given that all of Karen McManus’ other novels are at the top of her best list, I’m surprised that this 2021 thriller, You’ll Be the Death of Me, slipped through her radar. No fear, we have it now some six months later, and it was all worth it.
Ivy, Mateo, and Cal all used to be friends in middle school after experiencing the “best day ever” that involved skipping out of the middle of a field trip. Cut to senior year of high school where none of them speak to each other anymore. What brings them together in this story though, is a swirling of bad things. Ivy just lost class president to someone who ran as a joke, Mateo is struggling to balance multiple jobs with caring for his ailing mother and her home-grown business that recently went under, and Cal is mourning the loss of a relationship and maybe also an identity crisis. They all magically show up in the school parking lot one fateful morning and decide on a whim to skip out on their probelms.
If only those were the only problems they were going to face that day. Yep, instead of it being a repeat of their best day ever, it instead turns into the worst day ever with much higher stakes. It starts almost immediately when they see Boney, the student who beat Ivy for class president, walk into an abandoned building that’s been doubling as an art studio. That’d be fine, except Boney never gets to walk back out. In the time it takes for our trio to follow him into the building, someone’s killed him. They flee out of fear, but then slowly they decide they need to figure out why Boney was killed. Of course, they each have their own personal motives for figuring this out.
I won’t say anything because if I start, I’m afraid I’ll unravel the whole mystery and spoil the twists and turns for you! It’s crazy how everything connects in this book, and any assumptions I made were pretty quickly debunked. This is definitely a page-turner, much like McManus’ other works. I highly recommend getting your hands on this! And here’s hoping a sequel is in the future!