ARC Review: The Meadowbrook Murders by Jessica Goodman

From New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of They Wish They Were Us and The Counselors, comes a page-turning murder mystery set at a prestigious New England boarding school and the dark secrets a killer desperately wants hidden.

Secrets don’t die when you do.

It’s the first week of senior year at Meadowbrook Academy. For Amy and her best friend Sarah, that means late-night parties at the boathouse, bike rides through their sleepy Connecticut town, and the crisp beginning of a New England fall.

Then tragedy. Sarah and her boyfriend are brutally murdered in their dorm room. Now the week Amy has been dreaming about for years has turned into a nightmare, especially when all eyes turn to her as the culprit. She was Sarah’s only roommate, the only other person there when she died—or so she told the police to cover for her own boyfriend’s suspicious whereabouts. And even though they were best friends, with every passing day, Amy begins to learn that Sarah lied about a lot of things.

Liz, editor of the school newspaper and social outcast, is determined to uncover the truth about what happened on campus, in hopes her reporting will land a prestigious scholarship to college. As Liz dives deeper into her investigation, the secrets these murdered seniors never wanted out come to light. The deeper Liz digs, the messier the truth becomes – and with a killer still on campus, she can’t afford to make any mistakes. 

The Meadowbrook Murders is a gripping mystery about the inextricable way power, privilege, and secrets are linked, and how telling the truth can come at a deadly price.

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Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

I’m always down for a boarding school story, but what makes one even better? When there happens to be a murderer among them. In what I’m starting to see as Jessica Goodman’s usual writing style, The Meadowbrook Murders was a fast-paced and fun murder mystery to dive into on a slow afternoon.

Written in two first-person POVs, we follow Liz, an avid student journalist, and Amy, the suspect (ahem I mean, roommate) of the two students who were killed. I’m seeing a trend in YA murder mysteries to be written in at least more than one POV to give us more insight into the investigation, and thereby suspect more people, but in this case, I am not sure if it was my favourite use of it. I’ll get back to this point later. But with senior year about to start and fellow students in the lower grades still yet to arrive on campus, this book gave almost a locked-room mystery vibe as who else could have done it than someone with access to the school dorms on a private campus?

We get introduced to a number of different characters through Amy and Liz’s interactions. I will say that I didn’t immediately predict everything or who could’ve been involved, but we know off the bat that certain people were acting suspiciously. Namely, Amy and her boyfriend Joseph. In the room right next door, how did Amy not hear anything happening? Was this just a clever red herring or are one of the POVs intentionally misleading?

While I enjoyed the quick succession of chapters alternating between Liz and Amy that never slacked, I will say I still had some gripes with the book. I still rated it highly as pacing is super important to me in a mystery or thriller, but the characterization was a little lacking in my opinion. I constantly was confused between Amy and Liz’s voice, having to look up which chapter I was in. Although they came from different family backgrounds and class, the way they described their worldview felt too similar to easily differentiate. Their characters weren’t distinct, relegated to simple facts in their history that “impacted” their present choices.

In this regard, I also didn’t feel it was done well. While Amy had traumatic run-ins with the media in the past that made her even more wary of the press during their coverage of the murders, it wasn’t fully addressed how she could reconcile a potential allyship with Liz who practically represented the press. Likewise, Liz was far too stuck on pressing for the truth in her writing no matter how that may impact the people she was writing about. How could she balance that in her writing in the future as a journalist covering stories that weren’t just stories but the life and death of others she may even know? The ending of the story was pretty rushed and never really gave us a direct sense that they were able to overcome these issues. At most, it was brushed over as something they conquered or got better at, but it was never truly shown on page.

So if you like your murder stories as whirlwind whodunnits with good characterizations secondary to the plot, I would say this book is definitely still a fun one to read. It won’t change your life or anything, but it makes for an entertaining evening.