i killed zoe spanos

3 stars

This is a pretty good YA Mystery/Thriller about a teenager working as a nanny in the Hamptons who confesses to the murder of a young woman that she may never have met.

High School graduate Anna escapes her troubled life in Brooklyn to work as a nanny for the summer in the small Long Island town of Herron Mills. She’s hoping for a fresh start from her hard-partying days as a high school senior. But her hopes of having a quiet summer are dashed when she discovers that she bears a striking resemblance to Zoe Spanos, a local girl that has been missing since New Years Eve. People that knew Zoe have strong feelings about her disappearance, and as Anna learns more about Zoe, she gets the eerie feeling that she and Zoe are somehow connected – and that she knows what happened to her.

At the end of the summer Zoe’s body is discovered and Anna is charged with manslaughter. But things don’t add up and Martina Green, the teen host of a podcast about Zoe’s disappearance, keeps digging into the case to find the truth.

This is a quick and easy read, with a few surprising twists in the story. The book drags in the middle and the multiple times that Anna has memory issues or deja vu could have been handled differently and starts to get old, but I guess the author needed to bulk up the “mystery” part of the story. Most of those moments didn’t really make a lot of sense, particularly the multiple times that Anna seems to “zone out” and not remember she had plans or was supposed to do something. There are a few unnecessary supporting characters that add clunky red herrings to the story and don’t make a lot of sense. They appear to be added simply to fit the “mystery book” formula.

While there is nothing earth shattering new in this book, it’s an ok read.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.