Then there’s the fact that Celia has next to no reason to be investigating at all, apart from the fact that she was the one who stumbled onto the body. They didn’t feel very well defined, and to be honest, there were far too many of them for my taste (especially given that this a single POV story), and I kept having to go back and remind myself who was who. On the downside, just like with The Ivies, I felt there was a disconnect with the main character Cecelia and couldn’t really bring myself to care about her, or indeed any of the characters. The setting of a small town with so many generations of secrets provided a great backdrop to this story and it set the scene and mood quite well. The pacing was good and the investigation was interesting, with the events leading up to it starting off relatively quickly. This was a compact read and didn’t waste time going off track, which I really appreciated since I wasn’t at all in the mood for something that required too much analysis. Having read The Ivies last year, I was excited to pick up another mystery by this author. This review is so long overdue, especially as I had an ARC of this, but with the terrible couple of reading months I’ve been having, I only managed to sit down with this book two weeks ago.

Certain that there is a copycat killer around, Cecelia starts investigating, but the further she digs, the more questions come up and it’s starting to look more and more like this case might be related to the first murder in more ways than one. Seaview seems rather ordinary these days though, until history repeats itself with another homecoming queen murdered. Her grandmother is a famous author who initially rose to fame when she wrote a murder mystery novel based on the real life events that took place in the town surrounding the death of a homecoming queen. Thank you to the publisher, Penguin Teen, and NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.Ĭecelia Ellis arrives in Seaview, a small coastal California town, to live with her estranged grandmother after her mother’s death. But the more Cecelia digs into the town’s secrets, the more she worries that her own mystery might not have a storybook ending. With a copycat killer on the loose, Cecelia throws herself into the investigation, determined to crack the case like the heroines in her grandmother’s books. And she’s not Seaview’s first pretty dead queen.

On the surface, life is utterly ordinary in the California coastal town…until the homecoming queen is murdered. Synopsis: After the death of her mom (screw cancer), seventeen-year-old Cecelia Ellis goes to live with her estranged grandmother, a celebrated author whose Victorian mansion is as creepy as the murder mysteries she writes.

4 dead queens