This a pre release copy from Netgalley, but was published in January 2016.
All I am going to say about this book, and I will be brief, is please do not read this book! It is terrible! I am going to explain to you why I picked it to read though….
The premise of the book is this: Tamzin Clarke lives in New York with her mum and dad. Her dad runs an antique store and her mum is a policewoman. she has a boyfriend (pick generic American boys name, I can’t remember it) who is in a band and plays loads of instruments, and runs some dance group thing with a girl called Macy (who is horrible). oh, and there’s a ghost called Daniel who she instantly falls in love with even though she’s had a boyfriend for ever….
At the beginning of the book someone called Vicki is working as an undercover cop in the red light district. she is attacked by a man with an English accent who kills her. Vicki, it turns out, is the adopted (sort of) sister of Tamzin.
It all goes downhill from there. The writing is atrocious, and I mean really bad; fifty shades of grey bad! The characters are stilted and one dimensional, the main character is so annoying, all the other characters are generic ‘nice boyfriend’, ‘horrible friend’ and ‘cute kid’. The end bit (yes I did make it that far but I skipped a lot!) is the most unbelievable bit of the whole book. It also ties in the main character (who thinks he is Jack the Ripper and makes pies from peoples organs!) to Roanoke, the first settlers in America who disappeared; You see? It could have been so much better!
What is so annoying is that the story line could have been good if the book was edited better and the characters more fleshed out. It may be that the version I read was written before the final edit and that’s why it was quite disjointed, but that could just be me being generous. It does give me hope that I can get a book published though if this is a benchmark!
SO BAD words cannot express it! And, on Goodreads the majority of people give it five stars!! unbelievable!!
grown ups can read teen fiction too 