Deadly Setup
Lynn Slaughter
300 pages
Fire & Ice Young Adult Books
published July 5, 2022
About the book
When her impulsive, romance-writing mom announces her engagement to a man whose last heiress wife died under suspicious circumstances, Sam tries to dissuade her mother. But her mom is convinced she’ll finally have the “Happily Ever After” she writes about.
And then Sam’s life implodes. Her mom’s fiancé turns up dead, and a mountain of circumstantial evidence points to Sam as the killer. On trial for murder, she fights to prove her innocence with the help of her boyfriend’s dad, an ex-homicide cop.
Moonbeam Children’s Book Award bronze medalist and Agatha Christie award nominee, Lynn Slaughter returns with a new YA thriller pushing the envelope on coming-of-age stories. Dark yet hopeful, Deadly Setup shows that wealth truly doesn’t buy happiness.
My review
You know what I love about book tours? You read things you might not normally have picked out. This is an unconventional coming of age story. When Sam’s father died, she promised to take care of her mother, which is proving to be a hard task as she’s just announced she’s marrying a man that Sam doesn’t approve of. The reader is tasked with deciding if it is just a normal mother – teenage daughter rift or if there is something more. And when this man is murdered and Sam is the lead suspect, so many potential suspects pop up.
Part murder mystery, along with some court proceedings, part coming of age and part romance as Sam finds someone squarely in her corner. While I ultimately guessed correctly, I was always finding new suspects and changing my mind. I really liked this mesh of genres and read it rather quickly.
Leave a Reply