By Meghan Mazzaferro
Content warning: domestic abuse, murder, child abuse, physical abuse, bullying, death of a parent
Last summer, Alice Ogilvie’s boyfriend dumped her, and she disappeared. Five days later she returned, seemingly unscathed but refusing to talk about what happened. Now Alice’s best friend (who happens to be dating Alice’s ex) has vanished, and even though Alice knows in her bones that it’s not the same, no one is taking Brooke’s disappearance seriously. Well, no one except Iris, Alice’s tutor, who has her own motives for wanting to find Brooke. Between the two of them, and with a little help from Agatha Christie, Alice’s literary hero and queen of the whodunit, they’re confident they can find Brooke. But it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t a game, and that someone they know could very well be a killer.
The Agathas follows two girls who live very different lives, brought together by circumstance and the desire to get justice for a missing girl. The writing style is quick and immersive. Alice and Iris are compelling characters, and I wasn’t able to put the book down until the mystery was solved.
I mean it. I picked this book up while at home sick, and I didn’t put it down again until I finished it, five hours later. Because of that, I can’t really speak to pacing, but I will say the writing style and the way the clues rolled out was enough to keep me turning the pages for hours, so the authors definitely did something right. I loved the way the mystery unfolded; I’m one of those people who suspects absolutely everyone when reading a whodunit, and this book really leans into that, providing lots of suspects and motives that the characters and the reader have to work through. The book also does a great job exploring the whydunit, a.k.a. really diving into the possible motives of each character to figure out not just what happened to Brooke, but why. I was really invested in the investigation and got swept up in the mystery, to the point that when I figured out a clue before the characters did, I tried to yell at my book to warn them.
This book is, of course, a mystery, but it’s also an exploration of the two characters Alice and Iris, and the ways in which their differences and similarities push them into an unlikely friendship. While overall Alice and Iris felt like distinct, fleshed out characters, I did find that occasionally their speech patterns would change from one chapter to the next. I think this might be the result of having two writers building a story together for the first time, and I’m sure that will be ironed out in later books. It was a slight distraction but ultimately didn’t take away from my reading experience. I really loved following both Alice and Iris. I felt like I could see a bit of my teenage self in each of them and I think lots of teen readers will be able to identify with one or both of them while reading this book. I also loved the side characters that show up in this book, and I hope we can see more of them in the sequels.
Overall, I loved this mystery and these two main characters, and with all the little hints this book drops about older mysteries that haunt this lakeside town, I couldn’t resist running out to pick up book two as soon as I finished this one. If you’re a fan of teen mysteries and whodunits, I think there’s a lot to love about this book, and I can’t wait to read the sequel.