I was so invested in the 1930s mystery and yet so bored by the modern day students and their issues. I couldn’t get myself to care about Stevie, her friends, or her new mystery at all. The writing just felt so all over the place. The teens were so pretentious and/or precious that I just kept rolling my eyes at their interactions, especially whenever David showed up with his lame mysterious, aloof BS.

And I can’t understand how the battered tin that Stevie finds in a bed wasn’t discovered in the passing 8 or so decades. It wasn’t exactly hidden in a crevice or anything. I know the room where she found it wasn’t linked to any suspect in the ‘30s but did no student who’d stayed in that room ever see it and wonder about the items in there??? You’d have thought it might either have been tossed out if a previous student found it useless or shown to someone with authority if they thought the unfinished poem might be a clue or at least something at least worthy of closer examination. I’m now attempting to read the second book but am already so bored reading about David and his dad that I may just skip to the flashbacks and anything related to the Alice Ellingham disappearance.