Book Review: 'Two Can Keep A Secret' by Karen M. McManus

I don’t think I’ve ever done a book review on my blog before despite this being one of the things I had planned to do when I had first created my blog.  Since I recently finished ‘Two Can Keep A Secret’ by Karen M. McManus, I thought I’d share my opinion on it! 

I’m not very good at writing reviews at all so just keep that in mind while reading this post.😄

**No spoilers in this review**

SYNOPSIS

Echo Ridge is reeling. This picturesque town, nestled near the Canadian border, experienced its first tragic loss in 1995 when high-school senior Sarah Corcoran vanished while walking home from the library. Then, five years ago, homecoming Queen Lacey Kilduff was found dead in the aptly named Murderland Halloween Park. Now, the killer claims to be back. A small town that keeps losing its homecoming queens. Two murders, still unsolved.

RATING

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️(and a half)

REVIEW

After reading and loving Karen M. McManus' other book ‘One of Us Is Lying’, I had been really excited to read ‘Two Can Keep A Secret’ and had been looking forward to it coming out.

This is a thriller mystery book which is one of my favourite genres of book. I was always kept on my toes trying to guess who the villain of the story was. I’m not very good at working out who the villains are in mystery stories so the end was a surprise to me but looking back at the story now, I think other people who read this may work it out before the end. There’s a couple of different twists in the story which I didn’t always see coming either which added to the plot.

This story is told from two different character perspectives: Ellery - a new girl who has just moved to the town with her twin brother, and Malcom - someone who has lived in the town his whole life. Having the story told from from the different perspectives made it interesting and contrasted well it’s one another. 

There were quite a lot of characters mentioned in the beginning of the book which made it a little confusing at first to keep track of who everyone was but as the story went on, each of the. Individual characters became clearer. I liked that there were so many characters though because it made you question them all. And kept you wondering which of them committed the crimes. One slight thing I have for this book is that I felt that the characters could have been a little more developed as I didn’t feel like I fully knew a lot of them by the end of the novel. i just feel that you’re introduced to a whole town of people but you never really find out that much about them all. However, this really didn’t. impact too much on the overall story and perhaps it was a creative choice not to reveal a lot about every character - to keep mystery around them so that you were never really sure who to trust.

I was really invested in the whole plot and kept wanting to read on to find out more. There had been plenty of suspenseful and gripping moments which I had really enjoyed. I would definitely recommend this book, especially if you enjoy young-adult mystery novels.

Bye for now, xo