Hello hello and welcome or welcome back to my little bookish corner of the internet. Today I’m sharing my review of the upcoming release, Nothing More To Tell.
Synopsis
True crime can leave a false trail.
Four years ago, Brynn left Saint Ambrose School following the shocking murder of her favourite teacher. The case was never solved, but she’s sure that the three kids who found Mr. Larkin’s body know more than they’re telling, especially her ex-best friend Tripp Talbot. He’s definitely hiding something.
When Brynn gets an internship working on a popular true-crime show, she decides to investigate what really happened that day in the woods. But the further she dives into the past, the more secrets she finds.
Four years ago someone got away with murder. Now it’s time to uncover the truth . . .
Review
It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of every book McManus has produced, so when I was lucky enough to win an ARC of Nothing More To Tell on a Twitter giveaway, it genuinely was an all time high. I’ve already told my husband that the note that came with the book is now more important than our wedding certificate. He nodded solemnly and filed it safely away. He’s a good egg.
As always, McManus doesn’t hold back with this book, and there are so many layers to this story, and directions to be pulled in, that you’re not sure where to look. You really feel Brynn’s desire to solve the case, and you feel Tripp’s fatigue with carrying the weight of the world around with him. I had so much empathy for both characters, especially when they started to communicate about what they were holding with them about the case, and started to share out that weight. This doesn’t happen easily, and their reluctance to work together at first is for different reasons, but that just adds another – brilliant – layer.
As the story develops, so does your emotional investment as a reader. There’s no points when you can stop and take a breather from the punches being thrown at you, you just have to keep rolling with them as they land. And it’s brilliant. As an author, McManus has a talent of keeping your full attention almost before you’ve even realised you’ve committed it, and that happens in Nothing More To Tell within a few pages, holding you right up to the end and beyond, when you lay looking up at you ceiling, and wondering “well what do I do with my life now?”.
The mystery is a real in-depth, dig your teeth in to solve it type, but this is also a book so much about human nature, and how flawed even the best of intentions can be. How, when all we want is to help those around us, we end up making things so much worse, for ourselves and others. There was also hope and love and laughter, and these things balancing out on an almost equal scale is what makes McManus the queen of teen crime.
I finished the book in record time, seeing as I was in the midst of a reading block, and am already hotly anticipating the next book, because the thing is, every single McManus book just manages to hit a high score. No pressure, Karen.
Thanks for stopping by for this review, and a big thank you again to Karen M. McManus for running the giveaway that got this book into my hands early! Nothing More To Tell is out 1st September, and is the perfect Autumn read.
And On She Reads 